Triple hard salary cap felt from Toronto to Nashville
In one case it provided a boon, the other, a minor inconvenience...Plus, former Arizona Coyotes GM Lindsay Hofford wins a minor hockey title...and the most anonymous group of forwards in NHL history
On the ice, the Toronto Maple Leafs are forced to sign a conga line of college and junior goalies to amateur tryouts contracts when the NHL forbids them from and emergency call-up when one of their goalies gets injured.
Off the ice, former Tennessee governor Bill Haslam finalizes a deal to buy the small-market Nashville Predators for $880 million, which is five times the team’s annual revenue and roughly 400 percent more than they were worth in 2007, when the team was sold to a local consortium for $174 million. It’s the second-highest sale price in NHL history, behind the $900 million for the Pittsburgh Penguins, but likely won’t hold that spot for long because the Ottawa Senators, the only NHL team in Canada that has chronic attendance issues, will soon change owners.
And what do these two developments have in common? They’re both the direct result of the NHL’s triple hard salary cap, the one that got Gary Bettman into the Hockey Hall of Fame and has essentially given him a job for life. The first one, the one involving the Maple Leafs, is a minor inconvenience. The other is a major boon.
I’ve gone on the record many times as having absolutely no time for NHL teams that complain about getting jammed up by the salary cap. Particularly when they bring in gobs of revenue and were put in that position because of their cap management and a perceived need to sign a college player whose rights they still would have controlled for two more years if they had chosen to wait until after the season to do it. There was absolutely zero urgency to sign Matthew Knies right after his season ended at the University of Minnesota, other than to help him fulfill his Nick Robertson-like potential. (One outlet announced that the Knies Era had begun. Kid hadn’t even played an NHL shift and he already had an era.) Sure Knies would have been sour, but his only option would have been going back to play two more years of college hockey before becoming an unrestricted free agent. He would have gotten over it.
But it was the Knies signing that prompted the NHL to rule that the Leafs were not allowed to call up Joseph Woll for their game against the Florida Panthers Monday night. It forced the Leafs into essentially forcing Ilya Samsonov to play a nothing game for the Leafs, one which could have made him unavailable for the playoffs if he had been injured. Too bad.
The Leafs non-hockey operations people were probably not too upset. For that matter, neither were their hockey ops guys because they would have made the move knowing full well there was a chance the league would deny their call-up attempt. And the same salary cap they are so tight against has also allowed them and other big revenue to make untold amounts of money. And for the Nashville Predators of the world, fixed cost and depressed value for labour have driven up franchise values to the point where owners know that even if they perpetually lose money, they’re bound to cash out in a big way when they sell the asset.
The business of the NHL, despite those who run it, is just fine. The owners who were around in 2004 when the league shut down for a season and are still involved suffered a small blip in their business in exchange for a huge return. From the outside, it might look bad. But this is exactly how the system is supposed to work.
CATCHING UP WITH…LINDSAY HOFFORD
You go to the championship game of the OHL Cup, grab a program and look up and down the roster of both teams looking for a name that might stand out. And there it is, at the bottom of the list for the Toronto Jr. Canadiens Under-16 team: Head coach Lindsay Hofford.
Three years after being fired by the Arizona Coyotes amid controversy and eight years after he came excruciatingly close to winning the tournament with the Don Mills Flyers, Hofford is an OHL Cup champion. And don’t think he doesn’t value it. “We came so close eight years ago, lost in double overtime,” Hofford said after the Jr. Canadiens defeated the Vaughan Kings 3-0 in the championship game last week. “I remember I made a bad roster move in that tournament and it has bothered me for eight years.”
So things have come full circle for Hofford. He was a fixture in minor hockey in Toronto long before he joined the London Knights, then the Toronto Maple Leafs, then the Coyotes, so it should come as no surprise he returned to his roots. He is the founder and CEO of the Pro Hockey Development Group, a company that provides hockey training and runs tournament for youth players in North America and Europe. So when the coach of the Jr. Canadiens resigned in the midst of the Greater Toronto Hockey League playoffs last month, Jr. Canadiens president John Winstanley reached out to his old friend to carry the team over the finish line.
The core of the Jr. Canadiens team has been together since they started in hockey. They managed to win all-Ontario titles at the Under-11 (2018) and Under-15 (2015) levels. The Jr. Canadiens were deprived of the chance to win an Under-13 title in 2020 because of the pandemic and there are no Ontario championships at the AAA level for the Under-14 and Under-12 divisions. Hofford was a newcomer, one Winstanley wasn’t the least bit hesitant to bring on board.
“I knew a guy with Lindsay’s pedigree was needed to get these kids to where they needed to be,” Winstanley said. “This group needed someone who was structured and had a plan. And I saw it from the moment he came on board with the video sessions, the one-on-one coaching, line changes, pre-scouting.” In the tournament, which is essentially the all-Ontario championship for the U-16 age group, the Canadiens had four shutouts and gave up three goals in seven games.
The last most of the hockey world saw of Hofford came after the 2019-20 season when Bill Armstrong replaced John Chayka as GM of the Coyotes and fired assistant GM Hofford in one of his first transactions. Earlier that summer, the Coyotes admitted they had violated the policy of conducting physical tests on draft-eligible prospects prior to the NHL’s Draft Combine. And while much of the hockey world assumed Hofford was the guilty party, he steadfastly maintains his innocence.
“I had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with it,” Hofford said. “One hundred percent it wasn’t me. I don’t feel like I have to defend myself, even when I get thrown under the bus.”
PREDATORS BECOME (INEXPENSIVE) PREY
The Nashville Predators were officially eliminated from playoff contention Tuesday night when the Winnipeg Jets defeated the Minnesota Wild, but they sure made things interesting, didn’t they? The Predators battled right to the end with a roster that was so hurt and depleted that it forced coach John Hynes to employ arguably the most anonymous group of forwards in NHL history.
Consider the lines the Predators employed for their 6-1 win over the St. Louis Blues back on April 1:
Egor Afanasyev-Cody Glass-Philip Tomasino
Kole Sherwood-Thomas Novak-Luke Evangelista
Yakov Trenin-Colton Sissons-Cole Smith
Rasmus Asplund-Mark Jankowski-Michael McCarron
Total cap hit: $12,456,268. Connor McDavid’s cap hit: $12.5 million. With Matt Duchene, Filip Forsberg and Ryan Johansen injured, Tanner Jeannot and Mikael Granlund (and defenceman Mattias Ekholm) traded and Eeli Tolvanen lost on waivers, the Predators were forced to chase a playoff spot with what was essentially an American Hockey League lineup. The fact they were able to hang in until the last week of the season was indeed admirable.
DRIBS AND DRABS
Take this to the bank. Both Connor Bedard and Adam Fantilli will receive invites for Canada’s World Championship team, which will have whichever team picking second beating a path to Finland. There are scouts out there – a good number of them – who believe that Russian phenom Matvei Michkov will ultimately be the second-best player after Bedard. If you’re willing to wait until 2026, when Michkov’s contract expires, it will be well worth the wait. But if you need someone to inspire and energize your fan base now, Fantilli will be a ridiculously good consolation prize…Speaking of Canada’s team, it should have some intriguing young NHL talent along with Bedard and Fantilli, with the likes of Owen Tippett, Travis Konecny, Dylan Cozens, Owen Power, Kent Johnson, Mason McTavish, Thomas Chabot and Jakob Chychrun available. It would even be better if Drake Batherson, Jordan Kyrou, Robert Thomas and Carter Hart – all unavailable because Hockey Canada has banned all the players from the 2018 World Junior team from competing internationally – had been eligible…The Florida Panthers clinched a playoff spot Tuesday night. That should be enough to put Matthew Tkachuk second on a lot of ballots for the Hart Trophy…Speaking of Tkachuk, his former team’s demise is on the coach, not the GM. Brad Treliving made a great deal under enormous duress and while you can fault his signings and the fact that he dealt away a first-rounder in 2025 to get the Montreal Canadiens to take Sean Monahan, those moves were made with the expectation that the Flames would be a Stanley Cup contender this season. There’s no way this roster should not be in the playoffs. Somehow, Darryl Sutter managed to make Nazem Kadri the ant-Nazem Kadri. This contract was never going to age well, but nobody would have thought it would look this bad this quickly…Discuss amongst yourselves whether the Boston Bruins have just put together the best regular season in NHL history, but there’s definitely a case there, even though 11 of their points in the standings were accrued in overtime and shootout wins.
While I understand it might be difficult to compare eras, I think that it’s amazing that Montreal lost 8 games in that season. I think it went up to 12 if you count the playoffs.