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Gary Bettman Says State Tax Advantage is a “Ridiculous” NHL Issue
Published:
Bettman ahead of game three between the Panthers and Oilers:
Bettman: “It’s a ridiculous issue. When the Florida teams weren’t good, which was for about 17 years, nobody said anything about it. For those of you who played, were you sitting there with a tax table? No. You wanted to go to a good organization, in a place where you wanted to live and wanted to raise your kids and send them to school. You wanted to play in a first-class arena with a first-class training facility, with an owner and organization, GM, and coach that you were comfortable with. And you wanted to have good teammates so you’d have a shot at winning. That’s what motivates it. Could it be a little bit of a factor? If everything else were equal? I suppose. But that’s not it. By the way, state taxes, high in Los Angeles, high in New York, are we going to subsidize those teams?”
He makes some decent points. When the Florida Panthers went 20 years without winning a playoff series, did anybody talk about the tax advantage they had? Nope. The Lightning, on the other hand, have historically been pretty good, but struggled for a half-decade after the salary cap was implemented. The other teams from no income tax states are the Nashville Predators, Dallas Stars, Vegas Golden Knights, and Seattle Kraken. Vegas won the Stanley Cup in 2023 and finished a runner up in 2018. Dallas lost the 2020 final to Tampa and has been to three straight Western Conference finals while the Predators lost the 2017 Cup final and the Kraken have played only a few seasons since entering the league.
There’s been a lot of recent success with this group of teams, which is why the topic has become a big one.
From a casual/not hockey diehard perspective, it seems like this is an advantage for franchises that have done the prerequisite drafting and developing and organizational building. They lay the foundation and install the culture, then get to work with this tax benefit that other franchises do not have. But the cart and the horse have to come in a specific order. You can’t necessarily just dangle “no state income tax” in front of a free agent if your roster stinks and your coach is a retread. You can’t just take any group of executives, send them to Sunrise, and ask them to create a Florida Stanley Cup contender. What if, for instance, Chuck Fletcher was in charge of the Florida Panthers?
There are a lot of things you have to factor when talking about the NHL’s salary cap. There is the currency exchange rate between the U.S. and Canada. The cap total is also smaller than other sports, so marginal savings go a longer way. Cost of living has increased disproportionately in some areas of North America and there’s even the fading of the once-taboo idea that only northern teams are real hockey markets. You get legit crowds in places like Carolina these days, where the weather is better and the media scrutiny is less intense.
What’s most important when talking about the NHL and the salary cap is that the Flyers have mostly cleaned up their books. For the first time in what feels like a million years. That’s the big story on Action News.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com