LAS VEGAS — Four of the past five Stanley Cup championship teams have come from states that don’t collect state income taxes — and seven of the past 10 finalists.

Those runs, by the Florida Panthers, Tampa Bay Lightning, Vegas Golden Knights and Dallas Stars, have understandably sparked a debate over whether the teams involved have an unfair advantage in signing players at below-market rates.

In many cases, players signing in those states — Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Nevada and Washington are among the states that deduct no further income tax than the federal taxes — would lose millions of dollars over the lives of their contracts if they played north of the border or in high-income-tax states such as California, New York, New Jersey and Minnesota.

The NHL is keeping an eye on the situation.

In a recent poll of fans by The Athletic, 84.6 percent of 14,066 respondents felt that teams in no-state-income-tax states have an advantage. Of that, 42.8 percent feel changes need to be made to even the playing field, 41.5 percent feel it’s not a significant enough advantage to warrant complex changes and 14.7 percent feel the issue is overblown.

“It’s an issue that comes up from time to time in our room at the board level and general managers level,” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said last month at the NHL’s European player media tour in Prague. “There are no easy fixes. It’s not like we can just pick from Column A and fix the problem overnight. Players make decisions on where they want to play for a variety of reasons. Their bottom line is one of them, but the quality of life and the communities they live in is probably more important.”

Daly echoed that sentiment Tuesday at the NHL’s North American player media tour in Las Vegas. He said while it’s too early to determine if this is something that may have to be addressed, he has talked to the NHL Players’ Association about the subject and the mutual feeling is that leveling the playing field would be too complicated.

For instance, even if the league systematically adjusted the cap ceiling for teams in no-state-income-tax states, what would happen if a player was traded or sent to the minors? Also, if it was deemed that a player was willing to sign a “hometown discount” contract at lower than what he could have received elsewhere, how problematic would it be to try to determine how much of a discount they took?

The NHLPA, so far, doesn’t see this as much of a problem. Executive director Marty Walsh met with the two dozen players who attended the media tour in Prague and explained this would be a complicated issue to fix. Plus, they don’t see this being a debate in other leagues.

As Daly said, “This is not new. This has all existed over the course of time.”

But some players do see a need for action.

“They have to find a way to tweak it, honestly,” Ottawa Senators forward Shane Pinto said Tuesday. “If you look at all these free agents, you don’t blame them for going down south. It’s just what it is, and it’s best for their families and taxes and lifestyle-wise. But I do think they have to find a way, especially for the Canadian teams. They’ve got to overpay guys to come to Canada every time, and that messes up with the cap. I think they do have to find a way to try to just even it out.

“I know it’s not easy because it’s been like that forever, but I think it’d be nice to have an even playing field.”

To be fair, few were complaining about the lack of state income taxes in Florida when the Tampa Bay Lightning were a doormat in the 1990s. Few brought this up when the Florida Panthers didn’t make the playoffs from 2000 to 2011 and didn’t advance past the first round from 1996 to 2022.

“I think every place certainly has its advantages, whether it’s (lifestyle), and taxes is certainly a part of it,” said Nashville Predators star Filip Forsberg, whose no-state-income-tax team had a banner summer by signing Juuse Saros to an eight-year extension and Steven Stamkos, Jonathan Marchessault and Brady Skjei to contracts totaling more than $166 million. “At the end of the day, that does play quite a bit of difference on our salary. It’s a fair point. I’m not disagreeing with it.

“It’s above my pay grade whether to decide if it’s right or wrong.”

Defenseman MacKenzie Weegar signed an eight-year, $50 million contract with the Calgary Flames in 2022. He previously played in Florida, acquired along with Jonathan Huberdeau in the Matthew Tkachuk blockbuster.

Alberta has a relatively low income-tax rate among Canadian provinces. Still, according to the Turbo Tax and Smart Asset websites, Weegar would be making approximately $950,000 more on his current $6.25 million a year contract if he were being paid in Florida.

He’s not bothered by that. But he does think it’d be nice if the league and players’ union could find a mechanism to even things out in the next collective bargaining agreement.

“You definitely feel like it might pull some other guys down south to those teams,” Weegar said Wednesday. “So there could be something in the next CBA to work something out. But ultimately, the Tampas, Florida, you look at Nashville, the teams are winning. That’s what really pulls people in. The New Yorks and Calgary, if we start winning, nobody really cares about taxes.

“The contracts are already big enough. You don’t really notice the tax too, too much. You still living pretty comfortably. So I’d say, start winning, you’ll get your guys to come in, and your free agents that want to play there.”

Like Stamkos and Marchessault going from Tampa Bay and Las Vegas, respectively, to Nashville, defenseman Brandon Montour went from no-state-income-tax state to no-state-income-tax state. A day after celebrating winning the Stanley Cup during a parade on A1A in Ft. Lauderdale, Montour signed a seven-year, $50 million contract with the Seattle Kraken.

He said taxes were not the predominant reason in his decision.

“You can’t say money’s not a factor,” Montour said Wednesday. “But for me, that wasn’t what we were chasing. We had places that were the highest tax that we were considering, as well. I played in California. I played in New York. Obviously, the paychecks look a little nicer when you’re in Florida and Seattle. But it wasn’t a thing that we were focused on.

“It was trying to find something for our lifestyle and our family to set a spot and call home.”

Montour tried to grasp how the league and union could even address the situation.

“What do you do, like take a percentage off the cap?” he said. “Like if Florida signed somebody that was 10 million bucks, they’d take a percentage or 2 percent off the cap or something? I don’t really know what they would possibly be able to do.”

Montour said every player has different reasons to sign in different places, and there are many high-income-tax areas that are appealing. He thinks this is only a debate because these teams are in a cycle of winning.

“There are just too many variables to really control,” Daly said, “including the fact that there are some markets that are very highly desirable for players that have kind of the highest tax rates in the world. Yet there are other opportunities, other things, that make those markets attractive to players.

“So I just think there’s so much that goes into the equation of where a player wants to play, what he’s willing to take to play there. And a lot of that has to do with team chemistry and how teams are constructed and how the player sees himself fitting into the team in terms of their needs. And so to account for all those variables, I think it’ll be a very difficult exercise.

“Having said that, obviously there’s chatter out there, specifically in the Canadian media, that the Canadian franchises are disadvantaged. We take that chatter seriously and we always look for ways to make the system better. I just don’t have any obvious answers to it.”

Daly was asked if he could envision a scenario where teams in Florida, Vegas, Nashville, Dallas or Seattle have a lower cap ceiling than other teams. He said, “I don’t think we could ever have a different cap for different teams, even though we kind of do in some respects with respect to how the CBA works and bonus overages and the like. So I suppose maybe there’s a formula that you could think of that way.

“I have other ideas that I put ahead of that one.”

Asked if he’d share those, Daly laughed: “No.”

“Look, there are some crude ways you can try to make adjustments to account for it,” Daly said. “I don’t think this issue is the level of kind of trying to push something through, particularly without really giving it some advanced, thorough thought and running it through all the potential channels. I think sometimes when you rush to do something based on chatter, you kind of step into a hole sometimes and the unintended consequences kind of bear their heads.

“We’ll continue to monitor it. If we can make it better, we will. I mean, I could get proven wrong on that. If we have the next 10 years similar to the last five, then maybe it’s something that needs to be addressed. But at this stage, on the basis of a couple summers, I’m not really running to get there.”

That’s fine with Radko Gudas.

The Anaheim Ducks defenseman pays 13 percent in state income taxes in California, compared to zero percent when he played with the Panthers. Yet, Gudas said succinctly, “I don’t think the NHL should be stepping into tax problems.”

(Photo of Matthew Tkachuk at the Florida Panthers’ Stanley Cup rally: Rich Storry / Getty Images)

The window was quickly closing last May, the pool of available transfers nearly set for next season, and Lincoln Riley had yet to land the interior lineman he and USC’s defense still desperately needed.

Damonic Williams, one of the top young defensive tackles in the Big 12, was headed to Oklahoma. Derick Harmon, a 320-pound behemoth previously at Michigan State, chose Oregon. Within two days in May, two of the most coveted tackles in the transfer portal were out of reach. Others were finding homes fast. Time was running out to find a fit.

For Gavin Meyer, though, there was no real hurry. The Wyoming grad transfer had waited until the last possible moment to enter the portal, just barely beating the May 1 deadline. In part because he was graduating that week in Laramie, Wyo., where he’d spent the last four years. But also Meyer understood his circumstances made finding the right situation especially important. He didn’t want to just be a depth piece added to some defense at the eleventh hour.

“I think that’s 100% in people’s thoughts in the transfer portal,” Meyer said. “You have to find your right fit. There’s so many things that go into that. With players on the team, how many guys they have on the team, but also the coaching staff. As long as you’re in the portal and you have the right intentions, a lot of people see through a lot of stuff.”

USC had already added a transfer tackle in January, Isaiah Raikes, just to see him jump ship after spring. No matter how perilously thin the Trojans were on the interior, Riley didn’t want to add for the sake of adding, either.

The previous cycle had been “a good reminder,” Riley said later, of how adding a poor fit from the portal could be “one of the most damaging things you can do.” This time, he and his USC staff were intent on “bringing in the right guys from the portal, not just the right body types or right experience level.”

In Meyer, Riley and his new defensive coordinator, D’Anton Lynn, felt right away they’d found a combination of all three. Even if he’d never had the chance to prove it at the power conference level.

“He was one of the very, very few,” Riley said, “who checked all the boxes for us.”

Meyer has so far delivered on that initial confidence, even unexpectedly unseating the Trojans incumbent, all-conference defensive tackle, Bear Alexander, to earn a starting spot through the first two weeks. During that time, Meyer and Alexander have rotated evenly at tackle, playing roughly the same number of snaps (Meyer’s 49 to Alexander’s 48). But where Meyer has earned universal early acclaim from coaches, the tone surrounding Alexander has been decidedly different since he sat out most of spring nursing an injury.

While Riley has praised his progress, the coach also made note before the season how Alexander “is still very young on the football field.”

“Bear has a long ways to go,” he said.

Meyer, meanwhile, made clear to Lynn upon first meeting him that he’d have no trouble picking up the Trojans new defensive scheme. For more than an hour on his visit, they talked about the finer points of defense, while Lynn rolled tape, peppering Meyer with questions.

“We’re talking Xs and O’s, concepts,” Meyer said. “He’s asking me, ‘What do you see here? What do you see here?’ And we’re going back and forth, back and forth on all that stuff.”

It was an eye-opening exchange for Meyer.

“That was the moment when I was like, ‘Yep, sounds about right,’” Meyer said. “Everything I’d heard about him and how he perceives the game of football was exactly how I see it.”

And in Meyer, Lynn saw something USC’s defense was desperately missing a season ago: a consistent presence on the interior.

It didn’t matter that he’d arrived on campus only this summer. Or that his experience at Wyoming was spent primarily in a part-time role.

“From the very first practice, he was just on it,” Lynn said. “From the fronts, the adjustments, the pressures, seeing how he picked it up that fast was super impressive.”

Meyer’s role on the interior should only prove more integral from here, with Michigan, the defending national champs, looming next Saturday and a slate of beefy Big Ten fronts fast approaching after that.

But so far, the fit at USC has been everything he — and his coaches — could have hoped for, considering how late they’d found each other.

“Just in the perfect place,” Meyer said with a smile. “The perfect place to get better.”

CHICAGO — Seventy times a year, Barry Antoniazzi tosses on his black No. 27 jersey with “Bagodonuts” stitched onto the back, dons a firefighter helmet covered in Chicago White Sox pins and walks a block and a half to his baseball sanctuary.

Antoniazzi grew tired of paying for parking at Guaranteed Rate Field, so 11 years ago, he moved to W. 35th Street and S. Parnell Avenue where, in a normal year, he can hear celebratory postgame fireworks from his residence.

This is, of course, no normal year, and the skies over the ballpark are quiet nearly every night. The White Sox haven’t won a home game in more than a month, and stand on the doorstep of undesirable history as they limp toward the 1962 New York Mets’ record of 120 losses.

And yet, Antoniazzi’s faith in the franchise hasn’t wavered, even though his house of worship has become a house of horrors that has hosted one defeat after another. On Tuesday, Antoniazzi, a paramedic for the Chicago Fire Department, watched his beloved, beleaguered club drop its 26th game in 27 attempts at home. Just as no two snowflakes are exactly alike, the White Sox have repeatedly found new and increasingly painful ways to lose in a season that has felt like one long, extraordinary blizzard on the South Side.

On Monday, Cleveland Guardians rookie spot starter Joey Cantillo retired the first 20 hitters he faced. On Tuesday, a line drive to the thigh knocked out Guardians starter Ben Lively after two innings, but the team’s bullpen covered the last seven frames to seal a shutout. On Wednesday, Lane Thomas delivered a pair of two-run infield singles to fuel a Cleveland sweep.

Antoniazzi traveled to San Francisco last month to complete his mission of watching the White Sox in all 30 ballparks. He’s drawn to Guaranteed Rate Field for the chance at seeing something new — he’s never witnessed a no-hitter in person, for instance — and to support a team he insists can only go up from here.

“We’re not going to be this bad forever,” he said. “We’re going to get better. So when we do get good, I can say, ‘I stuck with them through thick and thin.’ That’s what keeps me coming back.”

Antoniazzi is not alone in his loyalty; some of the few thousand fans in attendance each night are true diehards, willing to stick with their team even as it careens towards the worst season in baseball history. But what inspires others to pass through the turnstiles? Why do they choose to devote several hours to watching a predictable ending unfold on the diamond instead of, say, cruising along the Chicago River on an architectural boat tour, or riding the Centennial Wheel at Navy Pier, or watching pennant races play out on the TVs at Timothy O’Toole’s Pub, or shopping on Michigan Avenue, or even just lounging on the living room sofa?

The White Sox sold 11,429 tickets for Monday’s game, though the true attendance count appeared to be less than half of that. There was a slight uptick Tuesday, maybe because of a $5 beer promotion or because fans wanted to snatch up some of the last Campfire Milkshakes of the season. Or there’s another reason, one that has grown in importance as this impressively bad season has worn on: witnessing the train wreck, one loss at a time.

“We’re here to see them make history,” as one fan put it.

For others, the wins and losses don’t particularly matter. Many attendees were in town for business, and had a night to spare and a couple beers to guzzle. Brent Poole, from near Winnipeg, said he consumed the best hot dog of his life at Tuesday’s game. As they weaved through the concourse in center field, Poole and Russ Palm studied the statues of Charles A. Comiskey, Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox. Poole hadn’t visited the stadium in 25 years; it was Palm’s first visit.

“Even though people aren’t here,” Palm said, “it’s still fun to come see this. Every park is different.”

Dan Murby traveled to Chicago from Boston this week for work, and since he’s already attended a Bulls game and a Blackhawks game — and since the Cubs were on the road — he spent Tuesday night leaning against a right-field drink rail as the White Sox sputtered toward their 113th loss. Dylan Jones and Gavin Orr, in town for the International Manufacturing Technology Show, hail from upstate New York, where, Jones said, “There’s nothing near us.” Jones visits Chicago every other year, and he tries to attend a White Sox game on each trip, no matter the team’s standing.

“I’m not even a baseball fan,” Jones said. “I just like some entertainment.”

One couple, with their wedding scheduled for Sept. 26, opted to treat Monday’s contest — their first baseball game — as a “first of firsts to start off our life together.”

If their union can survive the 2024 White Sox, it can persevere through anything.

The small crowds make the scene almost eerie at times. As a concessionaire pushed an ice cream cart around the concourse on Monday, he sounded a bell that echoed throughout the venue. After a harmless Guardians groundout or a first-pitch strike by a Chicago pitcher, one could identify a fan’s individual claps from several sections away.

On Monday, one fan, staring out at a sea of empty forest-green seats, texted a buddy that he’s seen “livelier wakes on a Monday night.” That morbid feeling can take its toll. Out in center field, a middle-aged man stood behind a thigh-high railing, watching loss No. 112 because a friend gifted him four tickets, and so he took his son and his son’s two friends. When asked how long he has been a White Sox fan, the pain in his voice was palpable as he lamented, “My whole life.”

At least on this night, in this place, he had company in that.

“We’re at rock bottom right now,” said Nate Lutzow, who spent his 24th birthday at the ballpark on Tuesday. “I wish the team was better. That’d push me to be here more.”

Still, there are silver linings. Some parents capitalized on the small crowds to take their children to their first game without having to navigate a chaotic scene with a toddler. Some took the opportunity to check the ballpark off their list in their bid to experience all 30 venues. A Philadelphian used his daughter’s relocation to Chicago as an excuse to see his 27th ballpark. A trio of New Yorkers spent last weekend taking in the Yankees-Cubs series at Wrigley Field and stuck around an extra day to catch the other team in town. One Clevelander donned a white Steven Kwan jersey and a black White Sox hat at Monday’s game, since he purchases a cap at every ballpark he visits.

Plenty of Guardians fans either made the 55-minute flight or the five-hour drive west past windmills and RV company billboards or happen to reside in the Windy City. Visiting fan takeovers have become the norm as the season has progressed.

Chris Ramos walks with his brother, Pat, and their friend, Jacob Swartley, to Guaranteed Rate Field for every game. They were running late for an Aug. 31 affair against the Mets, and as they approached the entrance, they heard an eruption of cheers from the crowd.

“We’re like, ‘Oh, what happened?’” Ramos said. “Look at the phone. Pete Alonso home run.”

The 1899 Cleveland Spiders lost 134 games, but most still consider the 1962 Mets and their 120 losses to be the record the White Sox are chasing. (Quinn Harris / Getty Images)

The diehards have certainly been tested this season. Randy Johnson attended games at Comiskey Park with his grandparents. He has bricks and seats from the old building, baseballs autographed by Frank Thomas and battle scars from decades as a White Sox fan. He made his friend, who has a Cubs tattoo on his right forearm, wear a White Sox jersey to Tuesday’s game.

“You get to see the Sox play,” Johnson said. “We’re South Siders. Win or lose, it’s the place to be.”

Swartley and the Ramos brothers have occupied seats in the right-field corner at nearly every game for more than a decade. They launched a blog, “From The 108,” in 2016 and a podcast two years later. They’re as invested in the club as anyone.

“Other years, when the expectations were actually there,” Swartley said, “were much sadder than this year.”

Still, there have been games this year in which the team’s pitifulness has threatened their motivation. Pat lives three blocks from the ballpark, but he couldn’t convince himself to ditch his couch Monday night.

“It’s tough to get out of the house on a Monday night,” Chris said, “and then to see these guys? Even us, who try to come to so many games, we’re like, ‘Ehh, not tonight.’ I could totally understand why someone who has to make even a 15-minute drive here would go, ‘Nah, not until they show me something.’”

The three friends debated the worst-case scenario for the White Sox over the final few weeks of this wretched regular season. The club figures to soar past that record mark of 120 losses.

“At this point, why not?” Pat said. “We came this far.”

“I think it would be more brutal to lose 119,” his brother countered.

“They’d need to get on a heater for that to happen,” Pat said, “so it’d be fun for a little bit.”

“They’d have to rip off 10 wins in a row,” Chris added.

Pat pointed out that their season-long winning streak is four games.

“But they’ve had many 10-game losing streaks,” Pat said.

“As much as we enjoy coming to the ballpark,” Chris said, “I think the three of us are pretty much ready for this year to be over.”

It has been a season like few fanbases have ever endured, challenging the level of commitment of anyone who frequents Guaranteed Rate Field.

“I know we’re terrible this year,” Antoniazzi said, “but it doesn’t change the fact that I love baseball. I love the White Sox.”

(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic. Photos: Quinn Harris/Getty Images; Joseph Weiser/Icon Sportswire)