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:
“Even a wise judge is hard put to adjudicate family affairs.”
—Chinese proverb.
“Fathers can seem powerful and overwhelming to their daughters. Let her see your soft side. Express your feelings and reactions. Tell her where you came from and how you got there. Let her see that you have had fears, failures, anxious times, hurts, just like hers, even though you may look flawless to her.”
—Stella Chess (20th century)
“France, indeed! whose Catholic millions still worship Mary Queen of Heaven; and for ten generations refused cap and knee to many angel Maries, rightful Queens of France.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“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)
“Anyone with a real taste for solitude who indulges that taste encounters the dangers of any other drug-taker. The habit grows. You become an addict.... Absorbed in the visions of solitude, human beings are only interruptions. What voice can equal the voices of solitude? What sights equal the movement of a single day’s tide of light across the floor boards of one room? What drama be as continuously absorbing as the interior one?”
—Jessamyn West (1902–1984)