Toronto Maple Leafs: Half the Cap for 4 Players? No Problem

The Toronto Maple Leafs signed Mitch Marner to a contract extension on Friday night.

Coming in at just under eleven million dollars annually, the Toronto Maple Leafs now have their top four players (Marner, Nylander, Matthews, Tavares) signed for just under half of the NHL’s salary cap.

Is it too much?

Can you win with half your cap dedicated to four players?

No and Yes.

Toronto Maple Leafs Cap Situation

Going forward, teams are going to have to adjust to the new rules the Leafs helped put in place:  you have to pay your players what they might be worth over their post ELC deal.

No more getting discounts on player’s primes and then overpaying for their twilights.   

It might take a while for other teams to feel the effects, but eventually the playing field will be leveled and it will pay off for the Leafs to have got here first.

The Studs and Duds approach has never really been tried in the NHL, but there are reasons to think it will work.

First, and foremost, it will work if the Leafs continue on with their commitment to refuse to pay money for mid-range players (who are massively overvalued league wide; hardly any team other than Toronto has a roster without some mid-range bad deals).

The only players the Leafs are paying more than minimum wage to who aren’t elite players are Zach Hyman, Andreas Johnson and Kasperi Kapanen, who all were either at or close to a first-line impact last year.  The potential to outplay their current deals is very high.

Otherwise, it’s all elite players or league minimums.

The Leafs got rid of Brown, Zaitsev, Marleau and Hainsey.  The common denominator among them is that they all were replaceable by a league minimum player with barely any noticeable downgrade.

In the NHL, elite players win you games.  Second line players are far closer to first line AHL players than they are to first line NHL players.

As long as the rest of the NHL continues to pay these players more than they are worth, and as long as they continue to allow the Nick Shores of the world to be available for free, the Leafs approach to the salary cap will pay massive dividends.

They have four players taking up half their cap, but they also have the best team in the NHL.  (At worse, you can argue Tampa, but the money they’re paying to Palat, Killorn, Johnson and Gourde is going to screw them if those guys can’t maintain first line quality production, which Palat already doesn’t do).  (Capfriendly.com).

The Leafs will be buoyed this year by the fact that Dermott is on an ELC, that Muzzin is playing for half what he’s worth, and Tyson Barrie is for some reason available to them for $2.5 million.   Rielly and Andersen are also both insanely cheap relative to their abilities and production.

All this is great, but the main thing is that the Leafs locked up their core.  As time goes on, the cap will go up, and the Leafs will just swap out guys like Muzzin and Barrie with Liljegren and Sandin.

They could re-sign Rielly at the cost of his current salary plus ditching Cody Ceci.   Replacing Andersen will be the toughest, but goalies are a crapshoot anyways.

The fact is that the Toronto Maple Leafs have taken a vision and made it a reality. The criticism they are facing is from people who are erroneously comparing the Leafs right now to past teams who were not doing anything remotely similar.

All that’s left is to win.