from Martin Merk of IIHF.com,

What do currencies have to do with hockey business? Quite a lot actually, the best hockey players are paid with money in many countries on three continents, and no salary is immune to the changing values of these currencies.

The weakening of the Canadian Dollar is an issue for Canadian NHL teams, one that is often reported whenever such discrepancies arise to the U.S. Dollar. However, the biggest impact of the global currency fluctuations of the last two years is felt elsewhere in hockey.

Among the large-scale currencies that weakened the most is the Russian Ruble which, same as some other currencies, dropped due to falling commodity prices but also due to sanctions and counter-sanctions that followed due to territorial conflicts with Ukraine.

Each Ruble a hockey player earns in Russia is worth less than half the U.S. Dollar value it was worth two years ago. Also in countries economically connected to Russia, such as Belarus and Kazakhstan, this crisis was to a less drastic extent felt in the form of a currency drop. Both countries are also part of the Kontinental Hockey League that also includes one team each from Croatia, Finland, Latvia and Slovakia.

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