The Toronto Maple Leafs added Jake Muzzin and his four million dollar salary for next season to the team on Monday night.
Now, this is obviously an amazing trade. Jake Muzzin, still probably the second best Jake on the team, is an amazing player. His salary is dirty cheap. That doesn’t mean that the Toronto Maple Leafs can afford him, however.
With the need to give a small countries GDP to Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner next year, the Leafs are in for a trip to SALARY CAP HELL.
Or so some would have you believe.
The reality is that it’s not going to be too hard to overcome.
The Toronto Maple Leafs Non-Existent Salary Cap Problems Fixed
The Leafs and the 200 Hundred Hockey Men in the Mainstream Media are operating on different levels.
The former are a progressive group of people who are thinking about running a hockey team in all sorts of new and interesting ways, while the later still make fun of Corsi and air entire broadcasts without discussing shot attempts, ratios, or anything that would let you know you were watching a hockey game in 2018 and not 2002, besides a crisp HD picture.
The main way in which the Leafs MGMT group is doing things differently is in challenging the perceptions of hockey dogma.
They do not: overvalue size, experience, or handedness. They do not put a premium on reputation, grit, checking or faceoffs. Just for starters.
The main way in which the Leafs will fix their salary problems is by inserting a bunch of inexperienced rookies and Tyler Ennis type bargains into their lineup. Don’t forget that it was only three years ago where they were regular dressing six to nine rookies per game.
While old school types will lament the cost of doing this, but actually, with a core of Tavares, Marner, Matthews, Nylander, Kadri, Rielly, Muzzin, Andersen, Johnsson and Kapanen, it’s not going to be very noticeable
Cap Going Up
The current cap is $79.5 million dollars. With a new expansion team just announced, it’s going to probably be something like $85 million next year, so the Leafs are having their troubles at the best time possible. It will be pretty hard for the league to add a new team and not raise the cap by the maximum allowable. Note that all information for this article is from capfriendly.com
Let’s forget about Patrick Marleau, he makes what he makes and you can’t buy him out, make him retire or trade him. Leafs are stuck with him and it could be worse. Barring a move that will instantly turn him into a legend, Kyle Dubas won’t be able to get rid of Marleau, and he might not even want to.
Of the current roster, Zaitsev, Hainsey, Brown and Hyman are all but gone. That’s 12 million dollars. Add in the five the cap will go up by, and there is the $17 million you need on top of the current Matthews/Marner cap hits.
Assuming they can’t re-sign Gardiner, that’s four million and if you add in the roughly two million dollars they’re already paying to Kapanen and Johnsson, you have six million which you can split evenly between them.
The Toronto Maple Leafs would now have Tavares, Marner, Matthews, Nylander, Kadri, Rielly, Muzzin, Andersen, Johnsson, Kapanen, Marleau, Gauthier and Muzzin signed.
Without even considering what Ennis type value adds they can find over the summer, they can still pick from the following players:
Trevor Moore, Jeremy Bracco, Pierre Engvall, Dmitri Timashov, Calle Rosen, Andreas Borgman (not yet re-signed but he won’t cost much) Rasmus Sandin and Timothy Liljegren.
You really aren’t going to notice a huge difference between Hainsey/ Zaitsev and Liljegren/ Rosen. In fact, there’s a good chance they’ll be better.
The Leafs minor league system is, I believe, somewhat underrated. Between the cap going up, the easy to replace players, and the quality of players currently knocking on the door, the Leafs salary cap problems are easily solvable.
I know this doesn’t fit the You Have to Trade One Of Your Star Players narrative, but only because that just a dumb narrative.