Are Salary Caps Always the Best Way to Go?

In most major sports leagues a salary cap system is implemented in order to prevent one team from spending way more money on players than another. The main idea of a salary cap seems like a great way to promote a sense of fairness amongst the individual teams. With a salary cap a team can no longer "buy a championship", like the Yankees try to do every year; at least that's what it's suppose to prevent. In some leagues like the CFL the salary cap acts as more of a guide line. If a team in the CFL decides to spend more than the cap permits, they will have to pay a slight penalty. Take the Saskatchewan Roughriders for example: they openly confirmed that they not only went over the cap, but they planned to all year. Their reasoning for this was that the extra money they would make by playing in the playoffs would more than cover the penalty charged for their actions. If this is allowed to take place then what's the point of using a salary cap system? It seems to me like a whole lot of wasted effort.

In other leagues like the NHL and NFL, salary cap systems have worked really well. In the NHL the cap has allowed Canadian teams to seriously compete with American teams, and their stronger dollar. Before the cap American teams were spending more and more money trying to build the best possible team. Canadian teams could not afford such ridiculous contracts. This meant that as American teams got stronger, Canadian teams got weaker and the NHL was on the verge of losing its core fan base. I guess it's really up to the situation, because if the league isn't willing to really enforce the salary cap, then there is no point in having one.