How the Toronto Maple Leafs Rebuilt in a Micro-Second
By James Tanner
The Toronto Maple Leafs are legit Stanley Cup Contenders.
“It takes at least five years to build a proper contender.” If you’ve followed the NHL for years, this is a logical thing to think. It’s practically a cliché. Rebuilding an NHL team is typically seen as about a five year process. So how did the Toronto Maple Leafs rebuild so quickly?
The Salary Cap Era changed everything. It wasn’t immediately noticeable, because it took the NHL a long time – both managers and players – to get used to operating in the cap system. The Leafs were one of the last teams to adjust, as the Dave Nonis era made clear. To be clear, by ‘adjust’ I mean that teams had to learn the now basic idea that in a cap system you have to bet on your players when they’re young rather than pay them for past performance, and that they had to learn that you could no longer buy your way out of your mistakes.
They had to recognize that you have to plan ahead and make roster moves accordingly, that you need to identify a constant stream of young talented players on ELCs and then move them out as soon as they’re valuable enough to get you something, but before they cost you too much.
Toronto Maple Leafs
In the early years, the Penguins and Blackhawks were masters of this and they have almost half of the Salary Cap Era’s Stanley Cups between them. Part of the result of this process is that teams that are smart about the salary cap and combine that with getting lucky in the draft can rebuild their team a lot faster than before. Enter the Leafs.
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The Leafs smartly moved out all their bad, long-term commitments, that was step one. Then they got a basic core of players (Kadri, Komarov, Andersen, JVR, Gardiner, Bozak)- a quality one, but one that is by no means amazing – and signed them to team-friendly deals that pay them for their prime, as opposed to what they’ve already accomplished.
In every case, the Leafs identified a quality NHL player and gave him perhaps slightly more money and commitment than they had earned to that point, but which would be cheap should the players continue their development. Basically, they found the risk vs reward sweet spot for every deal. In each case the Leafs were rewarded handsomely for a fairly low risk move. They again employed this with Rielly, Zaitsev, Hyman and Brown, which in turn paved the way for them to get a little risky with the Marleau contract.
When you add three to four high-end players (Matthews, Nylaner, Rielly and Marner) to an already decent skeletal core of a team, you get basically an instant contender. It doesn’t take five years, it just takes identifying a smart strategy to work within the confines of the game (i.e the salary cap) and a little bit of luck (drafting three franchise players in a row).
A lot of attention goes to the Leafs young stars, but almost none goes to the brilliance of what Shanahan, Hunter and Dubas did with what Nonis left them, and how they took the lessons of a decade of salary cap evidence and created one of the best built teams in the NHL.
That is the story of how the Leafs became contenders one season after finishing last in the league. That is why they can comfortably add to this year’s team in an effort to win now, without committing the sin of lacking patience. Getting Matthews et.al. was great, but the real win for the Leafs was adding them to a core of players signed to value contracts for the duration of their primes.
The rebuild is over. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.