Toronto Maple Leafs: Why Concentrated Cap Spending Is Correct

The Toronto Maple Leafs have a salary cap problem, you might have heard.

Ever since the NHL announced that the salary cap is most likely going to remain static for the next three seasons, Toronto Maple Leafs fans have been losing their collective minds in fantasy trade proposals.

The thinking goes that since the Leafs have a little over $40 million (just under half available) invested in four players, that they are going to have to trade someone important.

It’s a logical thing to think, so I’m no knocking anyone.

It’s just 100% wrong.

The reason this is wrong is that the Leafs are 100% correct to spend their money this way, and it is their critics, not the Leafs, who do not understand the value of players in the NHL.

This can be summed up in once basic principle: no one who isn’t at least capable of being an elite player should be paid more than a million dollars per year.   Since the Leafs don’t really have any of these team-killing mid-range clunkers (Johnsson and Kapanen could both be moved pretty easily) they are actually in great shape.

It’s frustrating to see the mainstream media playing up the Leafs Must Trade Marner angle or the Leafs Are IN Cap Trouble angle, when it’s not in the slightest true.

The fact is, the Leafs have no mid-range medium skilled players locked into bad contracts, and thus will be fine.

It is correct to concentrate your cap money into a few elite players.  Every team will eventually catch on and do this.

This is because replacement players and most mid-range players are, from a salary cap perspective, interchangeable.

I’ve tried to explain this before, but I’m going to take one last crack at explaining it today, since so many people bring it when I talk to them, but it’s always to ask why I care who plays on the fourth line if this is the case.

Why You Don’t Pay Mid Range Talent

When I say that your average $4 million dollar player is interchangeable with any random league-minimum player, it is for salary cap reasons.

The NHL is a league in where the difference between teams is very minimal.  Therefore getting an edge with a marginally better fourth liner is just smart.  Over time it might win you an extra game, and that could have huge implications in such a tight league.

So players are not actually interchangeable for practical purposes. It does matter if the Leafs kept Pierre Engvall and not Trevor Moore, even if the difference is minor.

BUT

In the theoretical world of the NHL’s Salary cap, they are interchangeable.

A $3 million player is better than a $750K  player.  But he isn’t $2.25 million dollars better.

Since star players drive results at the NHL level, money must be spent on elite players only (roughly 10% of the NHL has a significant impact on games; the actual measured difference between the 100th best player and the worst player in the whole game is much, much smaller than the difference between the 100th player and the best player).

To put it in the simplest terms, the opportunity cost of paying to upgrade from Justin Holl to Justin Faulk is inanely high.  It is the single worst way that NHL teams spend money, and as you can see here, every other team but Toronto (and possibly Vegas) is guilty of this.

Depth is an important concept, but I think a lot of people overrate its importance.  Depth is about winning at the margins.  Elite players make big gains.

Add in the fact that due to the preference of many NHL teams for size and grinding and “intangables,” there are usually  a lot of analytically solid 4th line depth players available to fill out your roster.

Just in the last year or so, the Toronto Maple Leafs have added Spezza, Agostino, Moore, Gauthier, Holl, Engvall, Clifford, Malgin, Gauthier, Rosen, Marincin, Petan, Lehtonen, Mikheyev, Barabanov and a few others to play for them for in and around the league minimum.

The NHL salary cap makes building a team difficult, but the Leafs are playing against 29 other teams (I’ll give Vegas credit) who are intentionally playing with one hand behind their back.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are not going to be affected as much as people think by a flat cap.  Their complete lack of bad contracts will save them.

Their strategy of concentrating money into a few star players will eventually be seen as the correct and basic way to spend cap money.