The Cycle of the Ticket Increase

In the past few weeks, many season ticket holders have gotten letters from their respective teams and in most cases received a nice little surprise. The ticket price has increased again. The Sabres did this a few weeks and most recently the Sharks have announced that their prices are going to increase. This begs to ask the question why?

In most cases, the explanation that is given is that the increase is going to be able to compete with the big market teams in terms of players salary. This is what the salary cap was originally meant for when the CBA was signed in 2005. Small market teams being able to compete with the big market teams. These ticket increases then increase the total revenue of the league, which then increases the salary cap and allows for teams to pay more for their players which then most likely means that a team is going to increase their ticket prices again which creates the cycle all over again.

Does this make any sense to anyone though? The league went through a lockout in 2005 to be able to return parity to the league and have all 3o teams compete on a semi-level playing field. But for most of these teams to be able to get the funding that they need to get this parity is to raise ticket prices. Now I know that there is a revenue sharing process as well but some of this can be alleiviated by sitting all 30 GM's in a room and whacking all of them across the side of the head by giving out crazy contracts that we see. If teams stopped overpaying for players this cycle would not have to continue. Also, we would not have salaries at the same level as they were before the lockout. Just now everyone is bearing the load