Hard Cap, Soft Cap and Salary Floor
A salary cap can be defined as a "hard" cap or a "soft" cap. A hard cap represents a maximum amount that may not be exceeded for any reason. Contracts which cause a team to violate a hard cap are subject to major sanctions, including the stripping of championships won while breaching salary cap rules, and voiding violating contracts. Hard caps are designed so that penalties deter breaking the cap, but there are numerous examples of clubs who occasionally and/or systematically cheat the cap.
A soft cap represents an amount which may be exceeded in limited circumstances, but otherwise exceeding the cap will trigger a penalty which is known in advance. Typically these penalties are financial in nature; the luxury tax is a common penalty used by leagues.
A salary floor is a minimum amount that must be spent on the team as a whole; this is separate from the minimum salary for each player. Some leagues, in particular the NFL, require teams to meet the salary floor every year, which helps prevent teams from using the salary cap to minimize costs.
Read more about this topic: Salary Cap
Famous quotes containing the words hard, soft, cap, salary and/or floor:
“It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)
“This, mayhap, was not logic, but it was something more potent, more real than logic—the soft insinuating voice of Sentiment.”
—Emmuska, Baroness Orczy (1865–1947)
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)
“Social and scientific progress are assured, sir, once our great system of postpossession payments is in operation, not the installment plan, no sir, but a system of small postpossession payments that clinch the investment. No possible rational human wish unfulfilled. A man with a salary of fifty dollars a week can start payments on a Rolls-Royce, the Waldorf-Astoria, or a troupe of trained seals if he so desires.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
““Trams and dusty trees.
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.””
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)