Toronto Maple Leafs: Salary Cap Will Be Lower Than Estimated

The Toronto Maple Leafs were always set to find themselves painfully tight against the salary cap next season.

Today’s news, however, will likely push them even tighter.

The projected salary cap for the 2019-20 NHL season was long estimated to land in the range of $83 million. This was a fair assumption to make at the time, mind you, particularly considering how it happened to come directly from the mouth of the NHL Commissioner. And when it comes to the inner workings of the National Hockey League, one would think there to be no more reliable source than him.

On December 3rd, 2018, Gary Bettman addressed the media at the NHL’s Board of Governor’s Meeting and posited that the league was projecting an increase from the $79.5 million ceiling of the 2018-19 salary cap to $83 million in 2019-20. This was obviously significant news. Handing teams a whopping $3.5 million in extra spending space is not a small feat, and this cushion carried the ability to drastically alter the face of the offseason.

With so many talented RFAs hitting the market all at once, as well – including Mitch Marner, Andreas Johnsson, and Kasperi Kapanen for the Leafs – their expectedly pricey extensions meant that organizations would be grasping for every extra morsel of wiggle room they could find. Now, they would have it.

The $83 million figure was only meant to be an estimate, of course. There are a number of factors that go into determining the salary cap for an upcoming NHL season, with much left to straighten out, but Bettman’s estimate at the very least allowed general managers to go about shaping their offseason blueprints under the assumption of an expected financial ballpark.

As it turns out, that benefit does not exist. It never did.

The NHL is currently two days out from the beginning of their annual Entry Draft, and the specifics of the league’s salary cap – otherwise known as the sole determining factor for a team’s ability to make moves – has yet to be distinguished. This is bad. Very, very bad.

Now, it would have been one thing for the league to take its time in settling on their $83 million final answer. The decision may have come a little too late for comfort – less than 48 hours before the busiest transaction day of the year – but it likely wouldn’t have dropped a bomb in the middle of a number of teams’ offseasons.

Today’s report from Elliotte Friedman, on the other hand, accomplishes exactly that.

If you listen hard enough, you can hear the faint sounds of NHL executives scrambling to make last minute changes to their summer gameplans. Even in the event that the cap rises to its newly-expected max of $82.1 million, that is a difference of nearly one million dollars of space that teams had previously thought they would have.

One million dollars is a hefty sum. And while it may not seem like a ground-breaking amount of money in the grand scheme of things, it does equate to the salary of one decent depth player nonetheless and, in the Maple Leafs’ case, could very well represent the difference between keeping both of Kapanen and Johnsson, or being forced into letting one walk.

Once again, this is only an estimate. The NHL is expected to finalize their salary cap in the coming days, and it will only be then that will fans and executives alike are made aware of their team’s spending limits.

That’s normal for other sports leagues to do, right? Right?!?!

Thanks for reading!