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:
“Wild as it was, it was hard for me to get rid of the associations of the settlements. Any steady and monotonous sound, to which I did not distinctly attend, passed for a sound of human industry.... Our minds anywhere, when left to themselves, are always thus busily drawing conclusions from false premises.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Surely tis by faith we are upheld thro such trials—justice will be meted in time to those who fill soft places and malign men who perform heroic duties—”
—Elizabeth Blair Lee (1818–?)
“‘I have cap and bells,’ he pondered,
‘I will send them to her and die’;
And when the morning whitened
He left them where she went by.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“But compared with the task of selecting a piece of French pastry held by an impatient waiter a move in chess is like reaching for a salary check in its demand on the contemplative faculties.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“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)