The Toronto Maple Leafs are off to an incredible start and their architect deserves a ton of the credit.
He may not have been the G.M. who drafted William Nylander, Mitch Marner or Auston Matthews, but it didn’t take a hockey genius to know those players would be successful. He did however sign all of those players long-term, bring John Tavares home and has recruited a cast of great depth around them.
$81.5 million. That’s the number that Dubas has to work with. If he had unlimited resources, the Toronto Maple Leafs would be Stanley Cup favorites every season, but unfortunately there’s a salary cap, and that number isn’t going up anytime soon.
When Dubas originally signed the core-four, that number was expected to rise. In fact, there were rumors that it would get to as high as $88.2M by 2020-21. However, nobody saw the pandemic coming and the economics adjusted. As a result, the G.M. had to adjust as well.
Here’s what Dubas told Sportsnet’s Luke Fox in July, 2020:
"“If we were facing a situation where some of our core players were up at the end of this year and were unrestricted, or they had a large amount of leverage as some of our past [RFA] players have had, I would maybe feel differently and say that we’re going to have to make a major move and delete from our core.”“But with everybody signed going into this offseason, I think we’re gonna have some space to take care of our restricted free agents that we have and potentially look at some of our own UFAs.”"
Fortunately for the Toronto Maple Leafs, the team’s core players were locked up prior to the pandemic and the team doesn’t have to worry about major contracts moving forward, besides Zach Hyman and Freddie Andersen. Despite having half of the salary cap tied up in four players, Dubas has done an amazing job with the team’s depth.
All of these players make $2M or less and have been key parts of the organization this season:
- Justin Holl ($2M)
- Jack Campbell ($1.65M)
- Ilya Mikheyev ($1.645M)
- Wayne Simmonds ($1.5M)
- Zach Bogosian ($1M)
- Alexander Barabanov ($925K)
- Jimmy Vesey ($900K)
- Jason Spezza ($700K)
- Joe Thornton ($700K)
- Travis Boyd ($700K)
In addition to the depth that Dubas has signed or acquired via trade, Nick Robertson, Rasmus Sandin, Timothy Liljegren, Mac Hollowell and Rodion Amirov will all be players on this roster in the next 1-3 years that he personally drafted and developed.
The production from the depth is great in the regular season, but if they don’t contribute in the playoffs, it’s meaningless. However, based on the core that Dubas has built, it should be easy for him to continue to recruit older veterans on a league minimum contract to come to Toronto.
Hopefully next summer, Dubas is asking players to join a Stanley Cup winning organization instead of a team that lost in the First Round of the playoffs, but we’ll just have to wait and see. Either way, the architect behind this roster needs some praise right now.