Toronto Maple Leafs: Were Trades Salary Cap Dumps or Shrewd Moves?

The Toronto Maple Leafs had – by all accounts – a very strong offseason.

The Toronto Maple Leafs biggest off-season move was to sign top-pairing right-side defenseman T.J Brodie, who they hope will turn out to be the best partner Morgan Rielly has ever had in his short NHL career.

The Leafs facilitated this large scale acquisition by trading Andreas Johnsson to New Jersey and Kasperi Kapanen to the Penguins. While these trades should ultimate work out (Kapanen brought back two top-ten prospects and saved the team millions, while Johnsson was traded for a younger player who had more success than he did at the same age) the question everyone has is “did the Leafs sabotage their bottom-six” in order to do this.

More to the point: were these hockey trades or were they a sign that the Toronto Maple Leafs mismanaged their salary cap?

Toronto Maple Leafs: The Plan behind the Trades

In order to really understand whether or not this was a part of a plan, or a reaction to an error, you need to understand the stratification of talent in the NHL.

In the NHL, there are a number of one-number stats that seek to provide a simple way to understand or rate a player’s performance.  The two most popular are WAR (wins above replacement) and GAR (goals above replacement).  Now, no number is going to be perfect, but these have been modeled, revised and tested, and most of the informed hockey world respects and accepts them. (Which I do realize isn’t much an argument in their favor, but this entire article could be about that, and a quick google search should let you make the decision for yourself quite easily).

Secondly, these stats don’t need to be perfect in order to be useful.  It’s useful to rank players by goals and points, even though we all know there is more to the game.

Either way, it turns out that if you sort all NHL players who played 1000 minutes in every given years, whether by GAR, WAR, or even points, what you tend to see is that about 10% of players have a significant impact on the game (between 1 and 5 WAR, with anything over 3.5 likely to get the player award consideration).

The other 90% of players contribute between a slight negative and 1 win. Only a very small amount of players have a great impact on games. The difference between all other players is very small.  When you consider that the NHL is a salary cap league, this can lead to only one conclusion:  Spend your money on elite players only, while avoiding mid-range salaries, and seeking to find good players near the league minimum.

Seen in this light, the Johnsson and Kapanen trades look to be the result of smart long-term planning, that allowed the Leafs to ice a good team last year that had flexibility to improve and adjust this year.

Kapanen and Johnsson

The main takeaway here is that if you swap average players out for cheaper players, you don’t lose much.  Taking that further, if this is true (and I assure you it is) then it only makes sense to spend your money on high-end players, since they are the only players who make a significant impact.

The Toronto Maple Leafs have famously taken this approach to its extreme conclusion, and though I’ve often written about how much of a good idea I think it, it is important to realize that it hasn’t been proven in the real-world yet.

But based on the Leafs philosophy, the Johnsson and kapanan trades were essentially no-lose propositions.  While I did hate to sell low on Johnsson, the fact is that last season neither he nor Kapanen contributed anything last season that couldn’t have been replicated from Freddie Gauthier and Adam Brooks (to name two random replacement level players). They got as far as they got (8th under Keefe) with no contribution at all from those players.

The Leafs saw they had two replacement players making almost $7 million between them.  They know, from the math, that putting that money into an elite player (or a potentially elite one, at least) would be money better spent.

Before making these trades, the Leafs had Nick Robertson play a four game audition, and they signed KHL star Alex Barabanov.  Forget, for a second, that they were eventually able to game the system for Vesey, Thornton and Simmonds – when the Leafs made their two trades, they knew they had, at the minimum, replaced the outgoing players in the lineup with two players making roughly the league minimum, and giving them about $5 million to spend.

Which they used on T.J Brodie.

Statistically, the equation of Brodie + 2 x replacement forwards  vs Johnsson + Kapanen + replacement defenseman is an easy win for the Leafs.

So it’s not just that the Toronto Maple Leafs have spent like sailors on elite players like Mitch Marner, William Nylander, John  Tavares and Auston Matthews, but they combined that with the ability to develop or acquire league-minimum players who represent no risk.

Not every signing is going to work out as well as Jason Spezza, Ilya Mikheyev or Tyler Ennis, but when you can sign five of those types every offseason (Vesey, Thornton, Simmonds, Barabanov, Lehtonen) you’re often going to strike gold.

The play the Leafs made this summer was as subtle as it was elegant.  They swapped two players who looked to be overpaid third-liners, but who had reputational value, in exchange for prospects and cap space, then replaced those players and improved their team through free-agency. The knew, when they signed Kapanen and Johnsson a year ago, that they were on team-friendly, easy-to-move contracts, and that was every bit by intention.

Sure, it might look like they “gutted” their bottom-six, but in reality the actual difference between dressing Johnsson and Kapanen vs Robertson and Barbanov is nil.  Meanwhile, moving them allowed the addition of Brodie, who is a much more significant player than either winger.  The Johnsson and kapanen trades were the culmination of a long-rang plan, and a philosophy rooted in spending each dollar of the salary cap in a way that gets the most value per dollar.