The St. Louis Blues thought they had a deal. Colton Parayko had other ideas.
When Parayko exercised his no-movement clause to block a trade to Buffalo this past week, it was the latest reminder that the balance of power in NHL front offices has shifted, and GMs are scrambling to adjust. Hockey insiders caught in the crossfire, relationships to mend in two cities, and a deal dead on arrival. How did we get here?
The no-movement clause has quietly become one of the defining power struggles in the modern NHL. By some reports, they’re now baked into roughly 37% of contracts across the league. From an organizational standpoint, the math isn’t adding up. You’re betting on a player’s production, health, leadership and locker room presence years down the road, with the added caveat that if things go sideways, he gets veto power over three quarters of the league.
And yet here’s what doesn’t get discussed enough: why are players demanding them in the first place?
Some of these NMC’s are constructed for very personal reasons. It could be due to family reasons and being rooted in one area. Maybe the travel associated with a certain area isn’t ideal. Perhaps the organization in question is often uncompetitive, and the preference is to avoid that scenario. I could see Canadians wanting to avoid playing in the States or on the flip side, wanting to avoid the hoopla of playing in their home province.
You might say these players have earned the right for whatever they prefer, and you may not be wrong. It’s hard to argue that. But how are organizations supposed to remain relevant or burst onto the scene if they have to accommodate each and every unique ask of the players?
The answer, at least partially, is hiding in plain sight. State income taxes.
Gary Bettman has repeatedly dismissed this conversation and it’s genuinely puzzling why. His incredulousness at the question is roughly equivalent to asking him about an expansion team on Mars.
Kris Versteeg, who retired back in 2018, openly shared on Game Notes that he weighed state taxes into his decision making throughout his career. Players today don’t even bother hiding it. In a survey posted by the Athletic in December 2025, 86.3% of 120 anonymous NHL players admitted state income taxes absolutely matter in decision making. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to connect the dots between no state tax markets and the sustained success of Vegas, Florida and Tampa in the modern era, or the kind of creative contracts they’re able to offer. Brad Marchand’s deal in Florida being the most recent example. The total value is $31.5 million, with an average annual value (AAV) of $5.25 million. The kicker is that it’s frontloaded, with a low base salary and significant signing bonuses that total $25.5 million across the span of the deal. Convenient, right?
Bettman’s standard rebuttal is that Florida and Tampa were irrelevant not long ago, and nobody cried taxes when Chicago and Los Angeles were hoisting Cups in the 2010’s. That’s fair, in a vacuum. But it ignores an inconvenient reality. The cost of living, housing prices and general inflation over the last five years have fundamentally changed the landscape for everyone, including athletes. NHL players aren’t making MLB or NBA funny money. Superstars aside, your run of the mill bottom six forwards don’t exactly have the luxury of ignoring their finances. When your average Joe feels the financial squeeze, so do guys on 3-million-dollar contracts with mortgages, families, a ten-year career window and next to no clue what comes next after hockey. Dismissing the conversation from the top doesn’t make it go away.
The broader player power shift goes beyond taxes though. Cutter Gauthier is the most vivid example, an unbelievable talent who, before playing a single NHL shift, essentially told Philadelphia to kick rocks after they drafted him 5th overall in 2022. He skipped development camp in 2023 and largely cut off communication with the Flyers brass. After many sleepless nights I’m sure, GM Daniel Briere traded Gauthier to the Ducks in January of 2024 for Jamie Drysdale and a second-round pick. Flyers fans may boo Gauthier for the rest of eternity on the east coast, but Gauthier is living it up on the west coast and turning into a star. Through 61 games this season, he already has team leading 32 goals and 25 assists, playing at point-per-game clips for a majority of the season.
And Gauthier’s situation is not even close to an outlier. Take Adam Fox, who was drafted by the Calgary Flames in the 3rd round in 2016 and still weaseled his way to his hometown team of the Rangers. Another Harvard alumnus, Jimmy Vesey, refused to sign with Nashville out of college. Kevin Hayes and Alex Kerfoot did the same while still in college. Most recently, it was Rutger McGroarty, drafted by Winnipeg 14th overall in 2022. He informed the team he wouldn’t play for them in 2024, forcing a trade to Pittsburgh.
NHL alumni from the 80s and 90s would laugh in your face if you described these scenarios and told them these youngsters would be getting away scot-free. But it’s the world the league now operates in, and the NMC is its natural extension.
So where does that leave GMs?
Backed into a corner, increasingly. The salary cap was already a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle before factoring in player preferences. The recent outlawing of double retention (where two teams could retain salary on a traded player simultaneously) stripped GMs of one of their few remaining levers to move bad contracts creatively. Now, not only are they working within tighter financial constraints, but they’re also doing so with fewer mechanisms to engineer a deal when a third team needs to get involved. Add an NMC on top of that and the margin for error shrinks to almost nothing.
They still have a job to do, organizations to move forward, with fans and ownership breathing down their necks. The temptation to play hardball is real and Chris Drury and the Rangers are unfortunately the perfect example. Circumventing Barclay Goodrow and Jacob Trouba’s NMCs to ship them out of Midtown Manhattan got the contracts off the books, sure. But anyone that follows the team closely knows Drury shattered the locker room in the process. That kind of dynamic spreads fast. Free agents weigh the allure of playing in New York against the possibility of being treated like chopped liver on the way out.
The fans haven’t forgotten either. When the Rangers honored their Olympic gold medalists at MSG recently, Miller, Trocheck and Sullivan were met with the reception they deserved. Drury was in that same group. The reception he got was anything but.
Drury dealing Panarin to his preferred destination in LA weeks before the deadline translated as a peace offering to me, a signal to both the beloved franchise player in Panarin and the rest of the league that the organization had learned something about how to treat people on the way out.
Whether it’s enough remains to be seen.
The 37% NMC figure will keep climbing unless something changes structurally. Whether that’s a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) measure to limit them, a broader league conversation about competitive balance, the National Hockey League Players’ Association (NHLPA) drawing a line in the sand, or Bettman finally engaging honestly with the tax question, something has to give. For now, GMs are navigating a landscape where the players they need to move have more say over where they go than ever before, and the Parayko situation is just the latest proof of concept.
Colton Parayko isn’t the first player to say no. He won’t be the last. Until the league reckons earnestly with what’s driving this shift, GMs will keep finding themselves right back where the Blues found themselves this week. Banking on a deal that isn’t a deal.
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