Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Kyle Dubas spoke out yesterday about the possibility of his players being offersheeted.
To sum up: he thinks it’s a joke. Like anyone who thinks about it for two seconds would have to agree with, the Toronto Maple Leafs general manager does not consider an offer sheet to be a likely scenario.
The media is flooding us with stories about the possibility of Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner being poached by other teams, despite the virtually impossibility of such a scenario occurring.
Some people have speculated as to why Dubas spoke out about it when he rarely seems to comment on the day to day coverage of the team.
Me, I think he was mocking the idea and it’s coverage, because it’s been ridiculous. It’s a constant topic of discussion despite the fact there is absolutely no chance of it ever occurring.
Which, of course I say while covering it and talking about it.
Dubas and the Offer Sheets
Just like I can confidently state that William Nylander will not be traded, due to a public promise from Dubas, I confidently state that there will be no offer sheet.
If you actually think about it, it’s a preposterous notion.
Forget for a second that the Leafs are the richest team, that they can exceed the cap during the summer, and that the cap is going up, and that they don’t have all that money committed yet for next year and the following seasons.
Forget also that they don’t really have any bad contracts that will hinder them from matching, that the offer sheets never happen anyways, or that risk vs reward doesn’t offer sufficient incentive for a team to even proffer one.
Forget all that and know this: the players actually have to sign them.
Why would either player leave a city where they are already Cup Favorites before their team has even been fully built? Why would they leave Toronto, the centre of the hockey universe, for a little extra money when no other team could even come close to giving them a better chance to win.
And not just a chance to win. A chance to do it in Toronto.
Incentive?
The players have no incentive to sign an offer sheet, so it will never, ever happen.
Say Marner signs one that makes him the NHL’s highest paid player, knowing there is a 100% chance the Toronto Maple Leafs sign him. He would be doing that knowing that he is decreasing his team’s chances to win. If he wants to hold out for a better deal, that’s fine. But signing an inflated contract designed to screw over the Leafs obviously isn’t in a player’s interest if he has to stay on that team.
The sole purpose of a GM offering a contract like that would be to mess with the Leafs salary cap, but it’s a low reward vs the risk of Marner actually signing it: good luck building a team around a contract the Leafs would walk away from.
The fact is that no party: not the Leafs, not opposing GMs and not the players have any incentive to sign or offer an offer sheet. With other teams, in other situations and other players, that might not be true. But in this one, it certainly is.
Oh and all this depends on the Leafs being dumb enough to let these guys actually go unsigned past July 1st.