Elliotte Friedman Confirms Bad News for NHL Teams Hoping to Lock Up Their Young Stars

The NHL salary cap will grow by a substantial amount over the next three seasons, putting additional weight on small-market clubs like Ottawa, Nashville, and Winnipeg, as well as others, to name a few.

With players compensated in U.S. dollars, exchange rate fluctuations and increasing payrolls can further contribute to the burden for these smaller franchises.

The freshly inked 7.7 billion Canadian television deal between Rogers and the NHL will be used to generate more revenue to help ease some player costs for Canadian clubs.

But since the league is so ticket-reliant, fans should also be bracing for a bump at the gate, and this is due to teams needing more money to pay their young stars.

While the economy itself is shifting, no rush is planned to change how hockey-related revenues are calculated, and thus, the overall financial structure of the league is not going to shift.

League officials and team representatives anticipate the sport to continue on its path of rising popularity and profitability. Expansion is also widely anticipated, with some speculating the NHL will grow to 34 teams at some point in the coming years.

At the same time, also increasing in tension are player contract negotiations, per NHL insider Elliotte Friedman on his recent '32 Thoughts Podcast.'

Much of the noise, particularly among younger players, is general managers seeing increased competitiveness in player agents obtaining the best value for their clients, especially with the rising salary cap, which is yet another layer to the dynamic NHL economic picture.

It will be interesting to see which teams are unable to keep some of their young stars over the next couple of seasons.