On Thursday’s edition of Ice Breakers on Daily Faceoff Live, Frank Seravalli and Mike McKenna discuss a potential NHL cap increase, the Florida Panthers without Ekblad, and the challenges faced surrounding the 2024 World Cup of Hockey.

Mike McKenna: On this week’s episode of Ice Breakers presented by DoorDash, we do have some issues that are probably a little more pertinent to the actual play on the ice Frank. We heard that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said at the NHL Board of Governors meeting is that the cap could go up $4.5 million and that is going to directly play into what the players do in paying it back. So, what needs to happen in order for the cap to go up that much? 

Frank Seravalli: Well here’s what I found out: a lot needs to go right when you look at this potential $4.5 million increase in terms of this summer, and because of that, a lot of people I have spoken to in the last 48 hours tend to believe that the NHL’s projection to go up that much and have the debt paid off this season is a bit rosy in terms of a projection. I’m told the players owe somewhere in the neighborhood of $400-$500 million, so let’s call it a ballpark of $450 million at the start of this season for what they need to pay back.

So, what does revenue need to hit in order to pay that back? I’m told the NHL exceeded expectations last year, they were sort of hoping for a $5 or $5.2 billion season and I was told they ended up closer to $5.4 billion in hockey-related revenue. In order to pay that debt back, they need to be in the range of $5.5 to $5.7 billion in revenue. All of that is a lot to say, you need to sell a lot of stuff in order to make that happen, including tickets, advertising, and jersey ad sales, in order to really pump that number up.

There’s going to be a lot of heavy lifting in order to get that paid off. The big reminder is that if the debt is not paid off, the cap only increases by $1 million and then it would have to slide to the following year for the cap to increase. So, a lot of the teams and managers I have spoken to have said “Yes, that would be amazing to have the cap go up that much, but at this point, we aren’t banking on it and we are only proceeding forward with the cap increasing by $1 million, and if it gets to that point then we are all in a great spot moving forward.” 

Mike McKenna: We’ve seen some pretty big injuries so far this season. You know we talked about Landeskog being out for the Avalanche and now take a look at the Florida Panthers. Defenseman Aaron Ekblad is going to be out for several months, it looks like for that club. Is there any way the Panthers are going to be able to bring in some reinforcements to fill that gap from their No. 1 defenseman who is going to be out for a while?