The Toronto Maple Leafs Cannot Possibly Re-Sign Zach Hyman

The Toronto Maple Leafs are going to have to let another bird fly from the nest.

Zach Hyman will be approaching 30 and the Toronto Maple Leafs are going to have to let him walk after this season.  This won’t be a popular take, but it’s a realistic one.

You don’t sign role players to expensive deals, let alone long term ones.  And that goes double when that player is approaching 30.

Zach Hyman will be a hard player to lose. Like many unskilled grinders before him, his popularity in Toronto is bizarre and hard to understand.  Hyman is a rich kid who would have been rich even if he never made the NHL, yet he is seen as some kind of working class hero. He works like a blue-collar guy, so get the appeal, I just don’t understand why, in Toronto, we always seem to venerate guys like Hyman or Darcy Tucker more than guys like Morgan Rielly or Mitch Marner.

I like Hyman and he’s a nice complimentary player at $2.25 but he’s not worth any more than that. In the NHL you should only pay big money to your star players, and Hyman is not a star player.

Toronto Maple Leafs and Zach Hyman

Coming off what likely would be a 30 goal season if he’d played 82 games, Hyman is at the peak of his value, and with his tiny salary he’d probably bring back quite the asset.

However, the Toronto Maple Leafs are serious Cup Contenders, so any future assets have to be weighed against what can happen now. The Leafs, with Hyman, have one of the best groups of forwards in the NHL, but on a team overflowing with skill, Hyman represents a different style that it would be hard to lose.

Since the Leafs have no weaknesses and the only reason to move him now would be asset management, it’s best to keep him.  They should essentially imagine that Hyman is the kind of player they’d pay to add as a missing piece at the trade deadline, and consider what they could get for him in a trade the cost to “acquire” him.

Then, at the end of the season, let him walk.  In this situation they aren’t losing a player for free, they are a) getting everything he contributes to the team this year and b) keeping the assets they’d use to acquire such a player at the deadline.

As an added bonus, they get an extra two-million (plus change) to spend next season. The reason the Leafs don’t trade away their free agents is because if you are going to make the playoffs, they are always worth more to you than the assets you’d get back.  It’s somewhat counterintuitive and most people don’t seem willing to try to fully grasp the concept, but the Leafs let players walk instead of recouping assets because it’s the mathematically correct decision.

Hyman is going to be 30 and giving him a long term deal is out of the question.  The Leafs have zero bad contracts and they want to keep it that way.  Hyman isn’t getting one.  Maybe he wants to re-up for his current salary in order to stay on a team he loves.  If that’s the case, welcome back.

But even at $3 or $4 million, it’s too much for a player who has already peaked, and doesn’t really score. Hyman may have flirted with 30 last year when everything went right, but he isn’t really that good and won’t ever be again.  Nice player, but losing him is just the cost of having a good team.

In reality, Hyman is the Leafs third best winger, and fourth if Kerfoot plays wing.  Fifth if Robertson breaks out, and sixth if Mikheyev is the real deal.  It’s honestly not that much of a loss.