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:
“I know some of my self-worth comes from tennis, and it’s hard to think of doing something else where you know you’ll never be the best. Tennis players are rare creatures: where else in the world can you know that you’re the best? The definitiveness of it is the beauty of it, but it’s not all there is to life and I’m ready to explore the alternatives.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)
“Soft are the hands of Love,
but what soft hands
clutched at the thorny ground,
scratched like a small white ferret
or foraging whippet or hound.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“... everyone developing
A language of his own to write his book in,
And one to cap the climax by combining
All language in a one-man tongue-confusion.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“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)
“Four and twenty at her back
And they were a’ clad out in green;
Tho the King of Scotland had been there
The warst o’ them might hae been his Queen.
On we lap and awa we rade
Till we cam to yon bonny ha’
Whare the roof was o’ the beaten gold
And the floor was o’ the cristal a’.”
—Unknown. The Wee Wee Man (l. 21–28)