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Comment by tixocloud | Hacker News Reader

What would be interesting is to take a deep-dive into the players that American and Canadian teams have - my hypothesis is that American teams just have better players overall, which could be due to the currency differences. As it is, the American teams arguably have a ton of Canada's best players.

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With the salary cap, revenue sharing, and everyone paid in USD, the gross salaries available for most teams to spend is about the same.

A big difference between playing Canada vs. the USA would be income tax. It's going to be north of 50% when playing in Canada.

All players are paid in USD, regardless of where the team is located. I think American teams have better players because of the living/playing conditions. There isn't a huge expectation to win every single year and for the most part the cities are nicer to live in during the winter.

>> I think American teams have better players because of the living/playing conditions.

To get the best hockey players via the draft, your team has to be among the worst for a few years. If you have a consistently middling team like the Leafs, you'll never be able to draft the likes of a Sidney Crosby, and free agents who want to win a Stanley Cup generally go to cities where it's most likely to happen. I don't think Toronto is at the top of the short list.

I think it's more that free agents don't want to deal with being under the microscope of the Toronto media.

I might be wrong, but I don't suspect that forex plays a large part. The NHL has both a salary cap and a salary floor (the cap -$16M) denominated in USD. Further, between 2009 and just earlier this year, the CAD was at par or stronger than the USD for most of the time.

I looked at some data [1] which shows that CA teams have an average salary ~5% lower than their US counterparts. The 2 teams with the lowest salaries are American.

You are right that the Americans have all our best players though. More than 50% of NHL players are Canadian, followed by ~25% American, and ~8% Swedish.

[1] http://www.hockeybuzz.com/cap-central/

I see. Yes, I am curious as to why most of our best players are on American teams. Wondering also if it's just that Canadian teams struggle with coaching or if it's the fact that we just can't get great players (which I don't believe is true. Despite the Leafs not doing well, the team isn't actually that terrible I'd say).

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