The Toronto Maple Leafs off-season promises to be an interesting lesson in salary cap management.
The Toronto Maple Leafs have to sign Mitch Marner, Andreas Johnsson and Kasperi Kapanen. Jake Gardiner is a free-agent, and they’re (seemingly) stuck with the absolutely brutal contracts given out to Patrick Marleau and Nikita Zaitsev.
How the Leafs solve this problem is going to be by playing a whole bunch of players who make the league minimum, be they rookies or just inexperienced sophomores/ free agents.
The consensus is going to be that the Leafs will ice a worse lineup next year, but that won’t be the case.
No Loss, Just Cheaper Contracts
Over the last few years the Toronto Maple Leafs have had a ridiculous amount of cap space, due to having five top-six forwards on entry-level deals (Matthews, Nylander, Marner, Johnsson, Kapanen), and having stars such as Morgan Rielly, Nazem Kadri and Frederick Andersen on team-friendly long-term deals.
I wrote so many times about the Leafs going all-in during the last years of Matthews and Marner’s ELCs that people had to tell me to stop repeating myself.
The Leafs knew this (Tavares; trading their first for Muzzin) but they tried to split the difference and stopped short of going all-in. (I think they weighed the fact that they had the stupidest possible path to the Cup against the value of spending more assets to win this year, and decided the risk/reward didn’t make sense).
Retrospectively, had they known Tampa was going to go down, and that they were better than Boston even without Kadri, I think they would have made more moves – but hindsight is 20/20, so whatever.
The Toronto Maple Leafs were wrong not to go harder for a victory while everyone was cheap, but one of the reason they didn’t think they had to is because of cap management. Specifically the fact that the optimal way to manage a salary cap (i.e get as many elite players as you can and pay everyone else the league minimum) has never been done, and they are in position to do it.
Knowing this, it is possible they felt that they weren’t as desperate to win during the cheap Matthews/Marner years as people like myself felt they should be.
This means that the Leafs will no longer have the luxury of over-ripening players in the AHL.
No Need
And they don’t need to anyways.
One of the biggest errors of classic hockey dogma is the idea that only the truly elite players can step right into the NHL at 18 or 19. In fact, if a team was brave enough to try it, it would almost certainly turn out that 18 and 19 year olds can be much more successful than is commonly thought.
Teams are way too concerned about rushing players, and they really shouldn’t be. What you lack in experience at this age you make up for in physical ability. The peak age for most NHL players is 23, and that is probably because that is where peak physicality and experience meet on the graph.
The Leafs are all about finding market inefficiencies, and the obvious one is that teams are too conservative about young players. Whatever you lose in experience, you gain in psychical ability AND their super cheap contracts.
That is why next year, you should expect to see Jeremy Bracco, Nic Petan, Dmytro Timashov, Trevor Moore, Justin Holl, Illya Mikheyev, Calle Rosen, Andreas Borgman, Timothy Liljegren and Rasmus Sandin all compete for jobs.
That is 10 players, and most of them are so good that they could step into the NHL and play a regular shift right now and be adequate. All these players have much higher ceilings than the players they’ll be replacing. (Brown, Marleau, etc).
For the most part though, the players listed above have had the chance to grow into NHL roles by staying in the AHL or a long time. That isn’t going to be possible anymore. The Leafs cap situation will demand that in the future, players are rushed much faster to the show.
This will be seen as a step back for the Toronto Maple Leafs, because fans, the media (and everyone pretty much) all overrate the value of experience and underrate the value of talent. The Leafs will have a lot of big contracts from now on, and they will no longer have the option to develop players over a long time. Players will have to step into the lineup at much younger ages, with much less experience, from now on.
I think the Leafs will actually have a better team next year then they have this year.