Zito said Niemi would probably have offers from several teams. Zito said the Blackhawks had to make hard decisions on the players they wanted to keep, and they decided that they wanted to keep other players over Niemi.

Image The Blackhawks announced Monday that they would not re-sign Antti Niemi to a one-year contract. Credit... Matt Slocum/Associated Press

According to the arbitrator, Niemi had earned a raise. Zito said he thought the Blackhawks might have been able to find a way to get that salary to fit under the N.H.L.’s salary cap of $59.4 million a team. Bowman said the Blackhawks exhausted all options to make it work.

“Antti is as disappointed as any human being would be,” Zito said.

Even on the night they won the Cup, between skating around the ice with the Cup and posing for photos, Blackhawks players talked about how the team would probably be dismantled because it was facing an enormous salary-cap challenge.

Soon, critical Chicago role players like Dustin Byfuglien, Brent Sopel, Colin Fraser, Kris Versteeg, Ben Eager, Andrew Ladd and Adam Burish were let go. Added were less expensive players like John Scott, from Minnesota, and Viktor Stalberg, from Toronto.

Niemi’s departure was perhaps the most drastic example of how the N.H.L.’s salary cap, while leveling the competitive field, has played havoc with team stability. And the Blackhawks, like other teams, are stuck with players with bloated contracts. The underachieving Chicago defenseman Brian Campbell, whose salary counts a whopping $7.1 million against the cap, has a no-trade clause in his contract. The Blackhawks also had to pay performance bonuses to their two top players, Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane, and had signed forward Marian Hossa to a 12-year, $62.8 million contract.

“As a fan, you don’t really spend a lot of time worrying about the system,” Bowman said Tuesday. “You don’t really sweat the details.”

He added that the long-dormant Blackhawks attracted so many people to hockey with their run to the Cup that, as he said of the fans: “They say: ‘Hey, wait a minute. What’s going on here? We just got used to these guys. Now you’re trading them away.’ ”