Players both in Utah and around the NHL have had high praise for Ryan Smith and the way he’s treated his team. He has spared seemingly no expense to make his players’ lives better — something that couldn’t be said of Alex Meruelo, who owned the Arizona Coyotes.
The general assumption among new hockey fans in Utah (especially those who primarily follow basketball) is that the best owners are the ones who are willing to spend the most money on player salaries.
While Smith certainly hasn’t been shy about spending money, that’s not really how it works in the NHL. Allow me to explain.
In the NBA, a team can choose to exceed the salary cap if the owner is willing to pay the luxury tax. With the NHL’s hard cap, though, exceeding it simply isn’t an option. Virtually every NHL owner is willing to spend to the cap, so that doesn’t separate the good owners from the bad ones.
At the time of writing, precisely half the NHL’s teams are within $4 million (about 4%) of the cap. Three teams are above it (which is only allowed during the summer) and an additional five teams have $1 million or less to spare.
That will change once Long-Term Injured Reserve comes into effect ahead of the season, but they’ll quickly creep back up to where they were.
Owners’ willingness to spend to the cap is likely to change with the NHL’s cap skyrocketing to $95.5 million this year and a projected $113.5 million by 2027-28, but here’s how it works right now.
How do NHL players’ salaries affect their value?
In the NHL more than any other league, the dollars and cents make a difference because every dollar given to one player is a dollar that can’t be given to someone else. That’s why fans care so much about how much money players make.
Take Oliver Ekman-Larsson as an example. When he occupied $7.26 million of the Vancouver Canucks’ payroll, there may not have been a more complained-about player in the league. But when the Canucks bought him out and he subsequently signed with the Florida Panthers for $2.25 million, he was suddenly a highly valued defenseman.
Similar things can be said of Seth Jones, Nate Schmidt, Tyler Myers and so many others. It’s also gone the other direction for a number of players, receiving more criticism as soon as they sign big deals (see Darnell Nurse and Chandler Stephenson, for example).
This causes underperforming players to be tagged with “negative value” labels, even if they’re still contributing to their teams. The current Mammoth roster is largely built on the benefits of taking on these bad contracts during the COVID era.
At the beginning of his tenure as the GM of the Coyotes, Bill Armstrong acquired a plethora of underperforming players, with “sweeteners” such as draft picks and prospects attached. Those sweeteners contributed to the drafting or acquiring of many of Utah’s up-and-coming players, including:
- Dylan Guenther
- Mikhail Sergachev (via trade of JJ Moser, who was drafted with a pick acquired through a salary dump)
- Maveric Lamoureux
- Jack McBain (via trade of a pick acquired through a salary dump)
- Artem Duda
- Will Skahan
Why didn’t the Utah Mammoth spend to the cap this summer?
If the Mammoth are truly trying to push for the playoffs, why didn’t they pursue any big names this summer? There’s a simple explanation.
Most analysts would agree that the Mammoth are more than a piece or two away from winning the Stanley Cup. Signing those big-name players might have catapulted them into the playoffs as soon as this spring, but they would have weighed the team down in a few years, when the core players hit their prime.
Remember: Once a team gets close to the cap, the only way to create space is to subtract players — whether that’s through buyouts, negative-value trades or, worst of all, trading valued players at a loss.
“We have to plan ahead,” Armstrong said. “If we go out and spend all our money this summer, we’re not going to have any left for the next summer. ... We want to make sure that we grow and that we find players in free agency that make us a better team, that help us get into the playoffs, but they don’t stop us from being great when we need to be — and that’s five years down the road."
Armstrong opted to secure a handful of veterans on mid-dollar, three-year deals this summer. Those will expire when Logan Cooley, Dylan Guenther and JJ Peterka get close to their prime, freeing up money for the free agency class of 2028.
