[Fire]

The CFL has introduced a non-player football operations cap for next season. It comes out to be $2.588 million or about half what the players cap was last season. I know the CFL might not be best place to get great ideas and I don't know the finer details of this operations cap, but I thought this would be a good idea for the NHL for a while now.

If they're interested in limiting costs and having a more equal playing field for every team, then this seems like a logical move. This new non-player cap would include salary costs for management, coaches, scouts, trainers, etc.

Right now teams like the Leafs can spend enormous amount of money for coaches and scouts, where the small market teams like the Hurricanes wouldn't have a chance to compete with them. Even the Flames couldn't spend the type of money the Leafs do for their operations without starting to lose money.

What are the downsides of this cap? I can see a problem with the CFL cap because coaches and management could just leave for another job in college football, NFL or one of the new leagues starting up. The NHL wouldn't have that problem. Even with a cap they would be highest paid coaches/management in the world of hockey. The rich teams like the Leafs and Rangers would hate it, but they probably didn't want the player cap either, even though financially they were much better off for it.

Hard to say what this new cap would be set at. If they go by the CFL cap it would be equivalent to about $40 million in the NHL. Which seems really high, but non-player salaries are not public knowledge for the most part, so what do I know, maybe some teams like Leafs are already spending over that amount. Though I doubt it still. I think $25-30 million would be more reasonable.