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Comparing the NHL Salary Cap to the NFL, Just for Fun

By: Adam Karnik


Original Date: 7/3/24


Hello sports fans, and welcome back to the IE Sports Radio Blog! It’s been a crazy week to be an NHL fan. First, the Stanley Cup was awarded to the Florida Panthers on Monday night. Then, all 32 teams descended upon Las Vegas on Thursday for the Awards Banquet before starting the 2024 Draft Friday night. And now, Free Agency has kicked off on July 1st with a bang.


The NHL Salary Cap is moving up this year from $83.5 million to $88 million. After two straight seasons of very little increase and absolutely no increase a year before that, the extra $4.5 million is a welcome relief to all of the teams and a sign that the league is showing some healthy growth and is finally out of the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. With free agency in full swing, I thought it might be fun to compare the NHL’s salary cap to that of the NFL. Is this really fair to either league? Absolutely not. Will it solve anything? Nope. Will it be entertaining? You bet!


The salary cap in the NFL this season is $255.4 million, nearly three times what the NHL has. The NFL is now virtually a license to print money. The $88 million cap, which is the highest the NHL has ever enjoyed, was eclipsed by the NFL nearly two decades ago when “The Shield” saw it’s salary cap explode from $85.5 million in 2005 to $102 million in 2006.


With that higher salary cap, NFL players are able to enjoy significantly larger salaries than their NHL counterparts. How significant? According to Over The Cap, the top 10 quarterback contracts in the NFL currently – Trevor Lawrence, Joe Burrow, Jared Goff, Justin Herbert, Lamar Jackson, Jalen Hurts, Kyler Murray, Deshaun Watson, Patrick Mahomes and Kirk Cousins – all average at least $45 million per season. So if these players were on hockey teams, they would each be consuming over half their team’s entire cap space!


Looking at it from the NHL’s direction doesn’t help much, either. According to CapFriendly, the highest paid player in the NHL is Auston Matthews, star center for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Matthews is an elite goal scorer, and certainly worthy of being at the top of the salary list. His salary for this season will be $16.7 million. The only other player that will make north of $16 million this year is Colorado Avalanche center Nathan MacKinnon who just won the Hart Trophy, the NHL’s most valuable player award. Both are deserving of their high contract status.


If they played in the NFL, they would be the 121st and 122nd largest salaries, respectively! They would be in the same category as safety Xavier McKinney of the Green Bay Packers and T.J. Hockenson, tight end for the Minnesota Vikings. Some of the NFL players ahead of Matthews and MacKinnon? Taylor Moton, Garrett Bolles, Elgton Jenkins, and Jonah Jackson just to name a few. Bonus points if you can name all of the teams those men play for without looking them up!


One last comparison and then I promise to stop (maybe). The highest paid kicker in the NFL is Baltimore’s Justin Tucker with an average annual salary of $6 million. That is only $250,000 less than what Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, a key player for the Edmonton Oilers and a big reason why they made it to the Stanley Cup Final this year, will make this season. So what should we take from all of this? Honestly, probably not much. The NFL has an unbelievable strangle hold on sports in North America. Comparing any corporation to it, much less another sports entity, just doesn’t hold up. But it is fun, and somewhat shocking, to see just how wide the gap can be between professional athletes simply based on what sport they choose to focus on.


Tune in to The Neutral Zone, hosted by Adam Karnik and Zachary Puplis, on Tuesdays at 9PM EST/6PM PST. You can also catch Adam Karnik on Chi-Town Weekly on Mondays at 7PM CST/5PM PST. Be sure to check out all of the awesome shows throughout the week on IESR, as well as the live calls on our partner station USRN. Shout out to our sponsors, Planet Jerky and Seal the Deal Wax Stamps. Visit planetjerky.net to buy your out of this world jerky today, and go to sealthedeal_waxstamps on Instagram and check out the awesome custom wax stamps. Shout out as well to all you loyal listeners that continue to help our network grow. Thank you for reading, and we will see you next time on IE Sports Radio; your direct feed for ALL that is sports.


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