Toronto Maple Leafs: Huge Cap Hits Won’t be a Problem
By James Tanner
The Toronto Maple Leafs still have to sign Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and William Nylander.
Until the Toronto Maple Leafs get the names of all three on a contract, people are going to speculate about offer sheets and trades, but they shouldn’t. There is no chance the Leafs lose any of these players.
The concern is that, in addition to the cap hits of these three players and John Tavares, the Leafs won’t have enough money left to fill out their roster.
These concerns are misplaced.
Long Term Deals
There are a lot of variations in how a team can allot its salary cap money, but there are basically two main ways.
- Pay high end players a lot of money and then scrape and save to fill out the rest of your roster.
- Try to spread the wealth across more positions and get more quality players but less elite players.
While option two might seem like the safest course of action – and there is definitely more room for error in option two – option one is vastly preferable, as long as you don’t end up misidentifying a member of your core and inking a long-term deal that doesn’t pan out.
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The reason for this is that in the NHL top line players are way, way better than everyone else. There just isn’t that much separating players on lines two through four, or bottom two defensive pairings.
As long as the fourth line player is a legit NHL player, then the difference, on average, between the fourth line player and the second line player is going to have more to do with opportunity than skill. I’m not saying they are equal, or that they will always be super close, but generally speaking, the gap between a Tavares and a Kadri will be bigger than between a Kadri and an Andreas Johnson.
So it makes sense to get as many elite players as you can.
Think of it this way: Tavares ($11 million) + ELC Rookie (Rounded to $1 million) will equal more Wins for your team than 2 x $6 million dollar players. (Maybe not if you could choose the two best $6 contracts in the NHL, but what i mean is any two average $6 million dollar contracts).
Partly it’s because of the skill disparity as outlined above, but its also because players like Tavares and Matthews make less skilled players better. And, if you go with the two average players, they have to play the tough minutes that Tavares can handle no problem. This is really just common sense.
And that is why the Leafs will be fine.
Contracts
Just for fun, let’s over-estimate the contracts the Leafs will need to sign.
Let’s say the Leafs give Matthews $12 million, and Nylander and Marner both get $9 million. When we factor in Tavares’ $11 we get $41 million dollars.
Now lets add Morgan Rielly’s $5 and Freddie Andersen’s $5 and we have $51 million.
The salary cap is $79.5 million and that would leave only $28.5 million for the rest of the team.
That doesn’t seem like much, because it only leaves about $1.9 per player for the other 15 players a team needs. But, the cap will go up because of expansion, meaning that next year, under this situation, the Leafs would be able to pay the rest of their roster an average of $2.2 million.
Well good news: They already have 11 players on this year’s roster making that or less. Which means that there isn’t that much fat you’d have to cut in order to get a full roster.
The Leafs would have six ‘core’ players, and all they have to do to stay competitive is keep swapping out players who earn more money for players who earn less.
Fast, undersized wingers are always available low in the draft. You put one of them – a Bracco, say – with a Tavares or a Matthews and you’re good-to-go. Defense only players like Nick Shore or Martin Marancin are so undervalued they too are almost always available for free if you want or need them. Point is, there is no shortage of cheap, value-laden options that you can use to fill out a roster.
Eventually, Liljegren might make Rielly expendable. Or Brown, Hyman, Johnsson and Kapanen price themselves out of the market. Let them go, they aren’t elite and a halfway competent NHL front office can replace them easily. Especially for as long as half the teams don’t respect statistical analysis, and stats-based teams like the Leafs and Penguins have massive edges over their competition.
The Leafs can always move Zaitsev. They can always decide Marluau costs too much and send him to the minors. There are ways to save money that don’t involve panicking and losing access to elite players.
No matter the cost, the Leafs are better off putting most of their money into six close-to-elite players, and replacing everyone else as time warrants. It’s not rocket science.
Tavares, Nylander, Matthews and Marner will all sign long-term deals and it doesn’t matter what you might have to pay someone good later on. Worry about it then.
You sign your core and you swap out as necessary. Everyone makes it seem so much harder than it sounds.