Quote:
Originally Posted by FireFly
No no, I get that. What I'm saying though is you still have the same number of superstars but now you have a lower salary cap and fewer teams to take on the burden of star salaries. So the top salary goes down, but now you have a team full of $3 million dollar earners instead of having the money spread out more widely. There would be greater wage parody between the stars and the lower rung players because you have to fit the same number of stars on fewer teams so you can't afford to pay any one single player 20% of your total salary any more.
Not to mention that the remaining teams are taking in fewer gate admissions unless you figure out a way to have 20 teams still play 82 regular season games. The logistics of shrinking to 20 teams would be a nightmare. The logistics of trying to spread out the talent pool again would be a nightmare.
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But what is a "Star"? Often it is just the players on a team who put up the most points. And if there were only 2/3 as many teams there would only be 2/3 as many stars.
The issue I would wonder about is what would happen to the salary cap?
For the sake of simplicity:
If there were only 3 teams supplying revenues of $400, $500 & $600. Then the League revenue would be $1500, and the salaries capped at 54% would be $810 and with 3 teams each team could be capped at 1/3 of that amount - $270.
Now if you drop the bottom team, league revenue would be $1100. Salaries capped at 54% would be $594, and since there are only 2 teams each team's salary expense would be capped at $297.
So if you drop the lowest "revenue" teams, the net result would be the cap for each team would go up (even though their revenue remained the same).
For teams like the Leafs or Rangers who would gladly spend more money if they could, it really wouldn't matter. But for teams that struggle to even approach the cap it would put them in a bit more of the "have-not" category (perhaps no different than the teams that were just dropped).
Mind you, this analysis doesn't take into account things like national TV contracts which would now be split among fewer teams. I'm sure there are many other things too.
(Why is this thread in OT? Seems like it would be better served in the main forum)