Quote:
Originally Posted by saillias
I remember reading the paper 2003ish and thinking hey wait a minute. We'd been fed this narrative by local media since the late 90s about Calgary being a small market that can't compete. Yet the SJ Sharks at the time were contenders in the west and had a 30millionish payroll. Other Canadian teams like the Canucks were not spending much more than the Flames. Nor the Oilers or Sens in the East. All playoff teams. The narrative about us being non-competitive pre-salary cap was half true. It sort of glossed over that the Flames were just managed incompetently for a long time
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I think you can say other teams did well with their limitations to some degree, and Calgary didn't, but it wasn't a fed narrative that there was a huge salary disparity.
The Flames fell under the league average starting to the 1990-91 season and then slipped further and further.
From 1997-98 thru 2003-2004 they were 25% below the league average and an average of 33M below the top spender in an era that had an average team salary of 34M.