The Ottawa Senators are staring at the same tax problem that hangs over the Toronto Maple Leafs.
An infographic making the rounds online puts the Senators and Leafs at the top of the NHL tax-rate list at 53.09%. That figure sits just above the Vancouver Canucks and Montreal Canadiens, the other Canadian clubs near the top of the chart. At the other end, the Florida Panthers and Tampa Bay Lightning come in at 36.57%, a gap that helps explain why landing premium talent can be such a tricky business for certain teams.
“Just gonna leave this here, analyze and do what you will with this info.”
“But looking at the Cup winners of the past couple of decades even the most staunch defenders of “there’s no tax advantage” can’t look at this image and say there isn’t a correlation here, like cmon people pic.twitter.com/71U5aZ6cTH”
- Capitán Kessel (@LeafsPassion85) August 4, 2026
For Ottawa, the takeaway is simple: if the Senators want high-end free agents, they may have to spend more to get them. That creates a knock-on effect that teams with a lower tax burden, like the Panthers, do not have to navigate in the same way.
The result is less efficient cap management. More money has to go out the door just to bring players in, and that eats into the space available for building the rest of the roster. In a league that loves to talk about parity, the numbers in this case point to a real advantage for some clubs and a real obstacle for others.
That leaves the Senators with a clear challenge. If they can’t rely on tax breaks to help sell a contract, they have to be inventive about how they structure deals and maximize cap space.
One route teams have used is signing bonuses, since bonuses are taxed differently than regular income. That led some clubs to load contracts heavily with bonus money. The league has now moved to curb that approach by limiting how much of a deal can be made up of bonuses.
The Leafs, for example, once signed players to contracts that were 90% bonuses. Under the new Collective Bargaining Agreement, that number will fall to 60% when it takes effect in about a month.
So for the Senators and the other Canadian teams, the work now shifts to finding fresh ways to make the financial pitch more appealing. And for anyone still arguing there’s no tax advantage in the NHL, the bottom of the league’s tax chart tells a pretty clear story.
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