David Alter gives his thoughts whether teams in states with no income tax enjoy a competitive advantage over their peers.
When the Florida Panthers advanced to the Stanley Cup Final for the third year in a row, it meant that the Eastern Conference would be represented by a Florida-based NHL franchise for the sixth consecutive season. Given that Florida has no state income taxes, this advancement reignited the debate on whether teams benefiting from this have an unfair advantage over their NHL counterparts.
The question was posed to NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman during the intermission of the Panthers’ 6-1 pounding of the Edmonton Oilers in Game 3 of the Final.“It’s a ridiculous issue,” Bettman said. “When the Florida teams weren’t good — which was for about 17 years —nobody said anything about it. For those of you who played, were you stting there with a tax table? No, you wanted to go to go a good organization in a place where you wanted to live. Where you wanted to raise your kids and send them to school. You wanted to play in a first-class arena with a first-class training facility with an organization, a owner GM and a coach that you were comfortable with. And you wanted to have a good teammates so you had a shot of winning. That’s what motivates it.”
Everything Bettman says is true. Players do prioritize the things that the NHL commissioner mentioned. But he continued.
“Could it be a little bit of a factor if everything else were equal? I suppose. But that’s not it.”
Here’s the thing about that: Seventeen years ago, the NHL did not have the parity it enjoys today. It now has healthy ownership in every market, something that couldn’t have been said more than a year ago when the Coyotes were playing in a 5,000-seat arena. Nowadays, the latter part of what Bettman said is true; most markets are indeed similar. And the reality is that take-home pay from a market with no state income tax is far higher than anywhere else.
But I actually side with Bettman on why the NHL doesn’t want to do anything about it.
With the current collective bargaining agreement set to expire at the end of next season, was there an opportunity to do something about the issue? Is there a strong enough appetite for it? No. Much of it would have to do with how much of a moving target they would have to deal with.
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