The Toronto Maple Leafs season has been postponed.
The Toronto Maple Leafs have not played since they beat the Tampa Bay Lightning on March the 10th.
Who knows when the NHL will resume, or in what form it will resume in when it does.
Before the break, it was announced that the salary cap would be going up.
This would have greatly benefited the Toronto Maple Leafs. The fact is, however, that with the season paused and potentially even canceled, the revenue based salary cap may not go up as expected.
Toronto Maple Leafs and the Salary Cap
Some people are speculating that if the NHL is forced to maintain or even lower their salary cap, that they might allow teams to have a compliance buy-out.
In essence, this would mean that each team gets a mulligan on their worst deal.
The Leafs do not have a single contract it would make sense to buy out. They only had one bad contract on the roster – Cody Ceci’s $4.5 million – and it expires when the season ends.
All of the other contracts the Leafs have are either short term and reasonable, or they are long-term deals handed out to elite players.
This would be a major windfall for the Leafs because while they don’t have any contracts to get rig of, they are the NHL’s richest team.
Therefore if there is a situation where they can buy players out, the Leafs will get paid.
Here is an example of how the situation would work: The dirt poor Florida Panthers (who recently announced plans to slash payroll) would trade the Leafs Sergei Bobrovsky (just for example) and the Leafs would buy out the remaining six years on his $10 million dollar a year deal.
In order to get out of over $60 million dollars owed, the Panthers would pony up a first round pick or a top prospect.
Obviously the best case scenario for the Toronto Maple Leafs is if the cap goes up as reported, and they can then target someone like Alex Pietrangelo to try and put them over the top.
But if the cap does go down, and buy-outs are allowed, the Leafs would have the potential to cash in big time.
It is sort of ironic, since people in the media constantly say the Leafs are in “Cap Hell” despite the fact that with no bad long-term contracts, they are in perhaps the most enviable cap situation in the NHL.
It’s not bad to have spent money, if you’ve spent it well, and the Leafs unquestionably have.