Salary
Average Salary: $1,150,000
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $6,325,000
Unless you are among the extraordinarily gifted, you won't get filthy rich playing hockey. Let's set aside the superstars for a minute and focus on the much more common story. Some "professional" leagues pay new guys almost nothing, or even quite literally nothing. Entry-level pay in the AHL is in the $30k range. Not complete chump change, but you could have a tough time raising a family of four on that. You're probably going to need a side gig. As you show more skill and have more success on the ice, you can command more money. Some AHL players make over $100k.
The KHL is an option, if you can land a slot on a team on the other side of the Atlantic. Similar to American sports leagues, the European teams have a minor league system that feeds players to the major team. Pay range can start in the $30k-$40k range on the lower level teams and move up to the high six figures or even seven for the top guys.
A few players manage to do both the AHL and the KHL. The seasons don't completely overlap, so when the U.S. season is done they head to Europe. Double-dipping hockey leagues isn't uncommon. There are some also low-level NHL players who still play in the AHL during their off time. Those guys sometimes make around $70k from their AHL contracts with more income from their NHL time. Not too bad, you have to admit.
But let's be honest, no one trying to make it as a pro athlete says to themselves, "If I work harder than anyone else, want it more than anyone else, and truly believe in myself and never give up, then maybe, just maybe, after all the years of toil, I can land a spot on a minor league roster making roughly the same salary as an entry-level computer programmer. That will totally make up for the fact that I only have six of my original teeth!" No, they want to be like Sidney Crosby, who signed a 12-year $104.4 million contract with the Pittsburgh Penguins before the 2014 NHL season.
However, just for grins, let's do some rough math. In Men's hockey, there are over 130 NCAA-affiliated college teams. If we assume an average of 25 players per team (active skaters and a few backups), that's roughly 3,250 players in U.S. colleges alone. Using the same estimate, Canada's largest collegiate sports body, Canadian Inter-university Sport (CIS), has around 900 guys, bringing us to 4,150. The AHL has 30 teams so that adds another 750 players, which, when combined with KHL rosters, brings our total up to approximately 5,600 active players (Note: We're not even counting European university players or KHL minor league teams at this point). None of these guys, it's reasonably safe to assume, would turn down an NHL slot. How many slots are there in the NHL, you ask? Good question. Thirty NHL teams x 20 daily players (18 skaters + 2 goalies dressed per game) = 600. If every single one of those 600 active NHL players quit right now, that would still only give each of the 5,600 hopefuls a 10.7% chance of making a team. And of the current 600 NHL players, how many are making Sidney Crosby-type money? For the 2014-2015 season there is a team salary cap of $69 million, so only five or so guys are in the $11-14 million per year range. This means if every single active NHL player quit simultaneously, and if you are one of the 5,600 hopefuls, you have a roughly .0009% chance of being one of those five. These estimates aren't precise (duh: estimate), but they should give you a basic idea about the odds of making the big bucks.