Would a salary cap bonus add some fun to Presidents’ Trophy race?

Tim and Sid breakdown last night's exciting match-up between the Winnipeg Jets and the Nashville Predators and pose the question of whether a 7-game series between the two would be among the best.

It’s a terrific race to the finish, a race all NHL fans should be focussed on.

Except very few are.

The race for the Presidents’ Trophy (since there isn’t a NHL president, isn’t it time to rename this hunk of silverware?) is an excellent one right now between Nashville, Tampa Bay, Boston and the expansion Las Vegas franchise. Even Winnipeg still has a shot, although making up five points on the Predators in the final two weeks of the season is a big ask.

Fans in those cities undoubtedly are eagerly eyeing whether their team can finish first overall. But outside of those cities? The reaction of most would be, “Meh.” Or perhaps, “Whatever.”

This is the way it’s been for a while. The only races that get a great deal of attention at this time of year are for the final playoff berths. Right now, it’s whether Florida can overtake New Jersey in the east, or which of Anaheim, L.A., Colorado or St. Louis is going to be the odd man out in the west.

We’re not saying those races aren’t interesting. They are. But shouldn’t there be much more attention being paid to which teams win their divisions, and which club captures first overall?

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The reason there isn’t, as has been the case for many years, is because there’s not a great deal to be gained through those achievements. Teams like to win as many games as they can, sure, but you only get one extra home game by winning the division, so there’s no sense blowing your brains out trying to capture a division title.

Toronto, for example, pretty much accepted some time ago that it wasn’t going to catch the Lightning or Boston for the top of the Atlantic Division. The team has played well of late, but really, for some time now Toronto’s been watching the clock, waiting for the regular season to end. When Auston Matthews was out with a shoulder injury, he certainly wasn’t rushed back. Not having home-ice advantage won’t decide on its own how the Leafs do in the first round.

But what if there was more at stake? What if winning a division, or winning the league, was more meaningful?

It’s not like this is a new discussion. Usually, the suggestion is teams that finish first should get an extra home game. Five home games in a best-of-seven series. The negatives to that are that it would give that team too much of an advantage, and alter post-season revenues too drastically.

Fair enough. So let’s have some fun and look at something else.

The most valuable commodities in the sport today are first round draft picks and salary cap space. Right now, the NHL gives the highest first round draft picks to the teams that achieve the least. The best teams get the worst picks. It’s hardly a system that incentivizes success, but it’s been that way since the universal draft was established. It rewards crappiness.

Having tinkered with that process in the draft lottery, it’s probably a system we’ll have to live with (until, of course, logic and common sense triumph and the draft is eliminated entirely. But that’s another column.)

Salary cap space, however, offers an interesting opportunity.

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What if, for example, each team that wins its division were to receive an extra $1 million in cap space for the following season? And the team that finishes first overall would get an added $2 million?

Now you’ve got a much bigger reason to watch the final days of the season, wouldn’t you agree?

Obviously, that cap money has to come from somewhere. It’s a function of the 50/50 split of NHL revenues between 31 teams and the players. If you add $1 million here, you have to subtract it somewhere else. The overall pie has to remain the same size.

No problem. If the total salary cap bonus pot was therefore $6 million – $1 million to each division winner, plus $2 million to Presidents’ Trophy winner – that $6 million needs to be subtracted somewhere else. The easiest solution would be to take it from the other 27 clubs. So those teams would have $222,222 less in cap space the following year for failing to win any of the bonus cap space.

So if things stayed as they are right now and the salary cap didn’t change from its current top end of $75 million, Nashville would earn an extra $3 million of cap rom for the 2018-19 season and have $78 million to spend.

Tampa Bay, Washington and Vegas would each get $1 million more, bumping them to $76 million. The other 27 teams, to keep the pie whole, would have $222,222 less, or $74,777 million. Hardly a debilitating blow. Cool, eh? $1 million of cap space is a useful chunk of change for an NHL GM. $3 million is a windfall.

But here’s the best part. Under this theoretical system, teams that capture the cap space bonuses would have the ability to either use all or part of it, or trade all or part of it.

So if the Preds hang on and win the Presidents’ Trophy, perhaps that organization doesn’t want to spend another $3 million on player salaries. They could keep $1 million and trade $2 million of it to a team that could use some space, say Montreal with those burdensome contracts to Carey Price and Shea Weber.

Edmonton’s another team that could use a little extra room.

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Or, Nashville could trade the entire cap bonus to Ottawa as part of a package to try and pry Erik Karlsson free. We know the Senators are listening.

Suddenly, winning a division title or finishing first overall has a little more spice to it. In a perfect world, the race for the Presidents’ Trophy would become a much bigger deal, at least as important as the fight for the eighth and final playoff spot in each conference.

One important caveat would be that the bonus pool wouldn’t be cumulative. There would be a reset every year. So say Nashville won the Presidents’ Trophy again next season. They wouldn’t then get to spend $6 million over the cap the following year, but just $3 million.

This system wouldn’t impact escrow as long as the overall amount dedicated to player salaries remained the same. Players might even like it if it introduced more flexibility in the system and movement. Obviously, there would be some complicated math involved to compute LTIR, overages, bonuses and the like. But the salary cap already has lots of math.

The lone negative to this system is that the rewards would be for next season, rather than for this season’s playoffs. Not perfect, we can agree.

The main benefit, meanwhile, would be to increase fan interest in races other than those for the final playoff berths. Who would object to that? Its impact on competitive balance, if that were to bother the league, would be minimal and temporary. As opposed to the draft, meanwhile, this system would reward excellence, not lousiness.

As the NHL continues to expand, a little excellence could go a long way.

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