Signing Bonuses: an overlooked tool in the Panthers player acquisition toolkit

Every July 1, the Panthers truly splash their cash to an incredible degree

In order to assemble and keep an elite team in sports together, a GM must use every available tool in order to extended a winning window as long as possible. Bill Zito has many of them at his disposal and has used almost all of them to sustain a team whose winning window is still wide open after three straight Cup Finals and two straight Cup wins. He can sell a beautiful practice facility, driving to the rink in a golf cart and of course, no state income tax in Florida as some of the many perks in his sales pitch, to say nothing of how good the on ice product has become.

But when it comes to sales pitches, one of the most effective can simply be about money, even if many current Panthers have taken hometown discounts to keep their cap hits lower and keep a winning team together. Cap hits only tell part of the story, since what they can’t tell you much about is how Bill Zito wields one of his best weapons most effectively, and quietly: signing bonuses. Signing bonuses are a rich team’s not so secret weapon, because it’s one of the few ways the NHL’s upper crust can flex their financial muscle in a hard cap world. No one really thinks of the Florida Panthers as one of those teams, but should they?

On July 1, 2025, the Florida Panthers paid out $77,679,211 in signing bonuses according to the wonderful website The Stanley Cap. While the Panthers are currently around $3 million over the cap at the time of publication, those bonuses are paid out whether or not a player gets traded long after it is paid. In total, 71.2% of the Panthers 2025-26 salary obligations (not cap hit) as of July 8, 2025 were paid out not in salary, but purely in signing bonuses. For reference, their salary expenditure this year amounts to a shade over $109 million in total. As a comparison, the Maple Leafs paid out $52.9 million in signing bonuses, the Vegas Golden Knights paid out $54.748 million, and somehow the Rangers fall in between these two at $53.345 million paid out in signing bonuses. Not only do the Florida Panthers pay the most in signing bonuses league wide, no one is anywhere near remotely close.

How are they able to pull this off? According to Forbes, they’re only worth about $1.4 billion which is only 24th in the league, way less than half of what the Maple Leafs are valued at ($3.8 billion) and the Rangers ($3.5 billion). While Vinnie Viola is an extremely wealthy man with a net worth of $6.2 billion according to Forbes, that’s still not as wealthy as James Dolan and MSG, nor one of Canada’s two biggest telecom companies. Viola’s estimated net worth has ballooned massively in the last year, even the last six months, but long before this current run of excellence began, Viola was still extremely willing to sign off on massive signing bonuses. Sergei Bobrovsky got a $7.5 million signing bonus on day one when he signed as a free agent for Dale Tallon in 2019, as an example. But after Bill Zito took over, the signing bonus trend took off into the stratosphere.

Here is a breakdown of a few contracts Bill Zito has given out, broken down by signing bonuses once again according to The Stanley Cap:

• Aleksander Barkov: $72 million of $80 million is in signing bonuses (his 2016-17 extension was paid entirely in salary)

• Matthew Tkachuk: $68 million of $76 million is in signing bonuses ($7.5 million of the $21 million in his previous contract with the Flames was in signing bonuses)

• Sam Reinhart: $61 million of $69 million is in signing bonuses ($6 million of the $19.5 million in his previous contract with the Panthers was in signing bonuses)

• Sam Bennett: $56 million of $64 million is in signing bonuses ($1 million of the $17.7 million in his previous contract with the Panthers was in signing bonuses)

And you can continue on with this exercise down the roster and see a similar story repeat itself over and over again. Will players take less money overall to play in Florida because the team has a consistent chance to win, no state income taxes and the like? Yes. Will they also take less overall if they get a massive chunk of it up front every July 1? Also yes.

Every NHL owner has a mind bending amount of money no matter where they derive their wealth from. All of them can use that wealth in a myriad of ways to help the teams they own get better or find that small advantage to put them over the top, but only a handful are often willing to. Vinnie Viola’s immense wealth comes from that type of environment, before he started Virtu Financial and now as he’s become one of the wealthiest people on earth. Looking for the smallest advantages and openings in the market is the difference between success and failure in that world (do not come to me for a well versed understanding of complex financial markets, go to my friend Alex Kirshner at Slate for exceptional financial world coverage from a sports journalist). Winning in sports might seem a world away from that, but it’s functionally not all that dissimilar.

Bill Zito found that paying out massive signing bonuses is an advantage to keeping cap hits down and thus keeping good teams together, but he could only pull off the type of scale that the Panthers currently have if Viola signed off on it. Paying out the amount he has in signing bonuses on an annual basis is a massive risk even for someone as wealthy as he is and for someone who bought the Panthers and the business arm they’re a part of for only $240 million in 2013, which doesn’t take into account the losses he reportedly took in those early years either. Those contracts are extremely hard to move around the league if they don’t work out since not every owner wants to shell out huge sums on July 1 annually, particularly if your entire team building strategy revolves around that concept. There needs to be not just belief but complete trust and alignment between the GM and owner for a strategy like this to pay off, and it most certainly has.

The NHL and some owners have clearly noticed that signing bonuses can be used in this way and starting with the new CBA in the 26-27 season, signing bonuses can only be 60% of the contract’s total value as opposed to what it is now. Contracts signed before the new CBA are still grandfathered in, and Vinnie Viola’s July 1st bill will not be getting cheaper in the coming years, but with two Stanley Cup banners in the Amerant Bank Arena rafters, he probably doesn’t mind that much.

Forget the golf carts, the sunshine and even no state income taxes, the secret sauce to the Panthers team building strategy might well be a truckload of signing bonuses and no team has used them as often, or as well, as the Panthers have. In a hard cap league where those loopholes and small advantages can be the difference between falling short and hoisting the Cup, it seems that the Panthers have taken advantage of them better than almost anyone else.

Keeping an elite team together requires a lot to come together all at once. With the Panthers, part of that is a hefty July 1 signing bonus bill each year. But what’s the value of winning, especially at this level?

Priceless.