I’m surprised to find a disingenuous argument from you Brian. Salary cap numbers aside, Pietro will easily put more money into his bank account over the life of the Vegas contract in comparison to the St Louis contract. Isn’t that the crux of the argument that it was purely a financial decision for him? (I also don’t think it was that simple, but your argument here is deceptive.)
I vehemently disagree with this statement.
The reported 8x8 is $2.4M more in real dollars. He will achieve some tax savings from playing/residing in a tax free state, but it almost certainly won't be $2.4M. Assuming he doesn't have a tax attorney to reduce his tax burden at all:
NHL contracts include a clause that signing bonuses do not have to be paid out if the player refuses to report to the team. Petro can't just not show up to camp this fall and demand that Vegas pay out the $35M in signing bonuses. Due to this, the bonus is not viewed as completely separate from work performance by the IRS and is subject to the same "taxed where you play" requirements that salary is. Additionally, if he is able to successfully argue that all $35M of bonus money vested when he signed and was not contingent on future performance, he would get taxed on all of that money as a resident of Missouri. Because he was unquestionably a Missouri resident for the majority of 2020 and on the day he put pen to paper. There is no reality where he can legally claim all of that bonus money as a resident of Vegas and also not subject to "road taxes." If he doesn't report it as income to road states, then MO is going to come after him for taxes on $35M of income he claims vested while he was a MO resident that was wholly independent of him performing any work within the state of Nevada.
Half of his salary and bonuses benefit from a 0% state income tax vs Missouri's 5.5% tax rate. That is a tax savings of $1.7M over the life of the deal. However, by playing in the Pacific instead of the Central he is going to get taxed at a higher rate on his road games than playing in the Central. Being in the Pacific division means more games in California than he would have played here. It means more games in Canada than he would have here. It means fewer games in tax-free Dallas/Nashville than he would have played here. The difference between California/Canada tax and basically every non-Winnipeg Central division tax rate is substantial. 1 road game in California instead of Dallas costs a player as much in taxes as they save in 2.5 home games in Vegas. You get the same rate in California vs Nashville. That 3rd extra game in California instead of Colorado costs about as much extra as they saved in 1 Vegas home game. Going to Canada instead of Minnesota wipes out the savings of another home game. Same thing with going to Canada instead of Chicago. So the extra taxes on road games wipes out about 8 games worth of the savings realized by playing home games at 0% state tax vs Missouri's state income tax. That is 20% of that $1.7M tax savings over the life of the contract, which brings the total amount of money gained by playing with no state tax to around $1.35M. That is still puts his take home pay short of what we offered by about $1M.
The tax savings become even less when you factor in all of the deductions, tax exempt investment strategies, etc he is able to utilize to minimize his tax burden. The more you reduce your taxable income via those methods, the less of an impact state tax makes on his take home pay.
Nothing about the info we have suggests that his take home pay on $61.6M in Vegas will be more than his take home pay on $64M here.
