Kirill Kaprizov has reset hockey's market. But what does that mean for the NHL's middle class?

Let's look at the middle ground of the NHL cap structure.

If you haven’t heard by now, Kirill Kaprizov signed hockey’s richest contract this week.

It’s an eight-year deal that starts next season, worth $17 million per season. It’s an eye-popping number in a sport where salaries have remained more stagnant than the other major professional sports over the past 15 years.

Kaprizov redefines the market for several players, and it only adds more juice to the question of how much Connor McDavid will make when he signs. In fact, there’s a piece I’m working on right now with Robert Tiffin looking at some of the potential impacts on another player who will be due a new contract soon.

The cap is going up, the money is going to start flowing, players should be excited, right?

Yes, sort of.

That’s one of the common conversations I had this week with players in hockey’s so-called “middle class” since the Kaprizov signing. Players who are the middle of the lineup types, the guys you need to win, but the ones that won’t ever lead a broadcast and won’t make promotional materials.

“The cap is going up, and we’ve all dreamed of making a couple million more, but then you quickly realize, the cap is just going up for those big guys,” one player told me. “It’s not like the guy making $2 or $3 million is going to all of sudden be a $5 million player. That extra money is going to go to the guys making $10 million and they’ll become $13 million players.”

It wasn’t as much of a complaint as it was an observation for this player, who like everyone else in this story spoke under the curtain of anonymity this week. For hockey’s middle-class players, the initial rush of a rising cap loses some luster when it’s really a spot where the rich get richer.

“You get how it works, so no one is upset about that, and they’ll be more money that makes it way down,” one player said. “But it’s not like all of a sudden everyone is going to get richer the way guys did in the NBA when that cap jumped.”

One player pointed to the two-time defending champion Florida Panthers as a prime example of how a “middle class” no longer exists on the roster. The Panthers, before the injuries to Aleksander Barkov and Matthew Tkachuk, were built this season with 11 players making more than $5 million. The rest of the project 23-man healthy roster was making $3 million or less.

“That’s how you’ll have to win, you are either in the top earning half or the bottom,”one player said. “But you have to split things that way. Teams with more than a couple $4 million contracts, that middle ground, probably aren’t a very good team.”

Those middle-class players — and to be clear context matters here, all the players I spoke to for this are all multimillionaires, which is why anonymity made it easier for them to speak on this — also noted how much depth roster spots will be reserved and probably taken by younger players going forward, and some of those fourth-liners will be pushed out of the league quicker.

“There are guys who are going to get their chance in the NHL quicker because of this, because that’s how you’ll have to do it with the cap,” one player said. “But that’s going to require some veteran players to understand they’ll have to take the league minimum to even be allowed to compete with the younger guy.”

The tide is rising. And while it, in theory, helps all players, it’s going to create some larger earning discrepancy across rosters going forward.