With the salary cap rising sharply over the next several years, to the point where it's going to become unaffordable for many NHL teams to stay competitive, it's also going to become easier than ever for teams to retain their own valuable players.

In theory.

As more teams fall farther from the cap's upper limits, teams that operate on "internal budgets," rather than just being limited by the cap itself, will theoretically be able to reach between the couch cushions if they have an All-Star caliber player they want to retain. After all, there are currently more teams with $33 million or more in cap space (five) than those with less than $7 million (four). That obviously doesn't account for teams that have, say, 17 guys signed for next season, but it's hard to envision a scenario where many teams are rounding out their rosters and not sitting on an amount of financial wiggle room that would have been unthinkable in the flat-cap era of just a few years ago.

Which is why Seattle was apparently able to offer Jason Robertson an AAV of $15 million, and Artemi Panarin in excess of $14 million a few months earlier. It's why Alex Tuch can make $10 million, or Pavel Dorofeyev $11 million. These are all good players to one extent or another, but eight-figure AAVs used to be the provenance, solely, of the tippy-top best players in the league, and it wasn't even that long ago.

But the problem for many of these teams may soon become much like Seattle's. They slid eye-popping financial offers to Robertson and Panarin, and both guys said, "Yeah, no thanks." Panarin took two fewer years and $3 million less against the cap to go to LA instead of Seattle. Roberton's landing spot for next season isn't yet known, but you can bet no one else is gonna make him the second-highest paid player in the league.

This is, to bring it back to last week's discussions about big-name guys wanting out of dead-end teams, the logical end result of "rings culture." What does it say about the future of your franchise if your (perceived?) outlook is so bad that a great but imperfect player like Robertson refuses to be overpaid by, what, $3-4 million a year? It's the same thing that's now happening in Columbus. Zach Werenski wants out, at least insofar as he is already signaling he won't be re-signing there when his contract is up in two years, and now word is that Kirill Marchenko is taking the same route out of town. (The fact that Don Waddell didn't have that info before Kevin Weekes said it live on ESPN is probably also not a good sign.)

This is where the concept of the "loser franchise" comes in. I've said it forever: Too many NHL teams have operated for years under the idea that simply getting into the playoffs makes them successful. Not coincidentally, the thought leader in this failed ideology has long been the Columbus Blue Jackets, where they once decided they would retain pending UFAs Panarin and Sergei Bobrovsky beyond the trade deadline, despite the fact that both made it clear they had no intention of re-signing there. Not only did they do that, but they also gave up a first-round pick, two second-round picks, a fourth-round pick, a fifth-round pick, a seventh-round pick — you'll note this is almost an entire draft's worth of future prospects — plus Anthony Duclair and three prospects to push all in with Matt Duchene, Ryan Dzingel, Adam McQuaid, and Keith Kinkaid. Miraculously, they swept the best-record-ever-to-that-point Tampa Bay Lightning out of the first round. Some people thought it was all worth it because the fanbase needed something to smile about.