Toronto Maple Leafs: Tampa Should Not be Allowed to Circumvent Cap

The Toronto Maple Leafs have been completely handcuffed by the NHL salary cap all season long, but one of their biggest rivals appears to be able to circumvent the cap at will.

The Toronto Maple Leafs have employed a studs and duds salary cap strategy that has been extremely successful, but due to a flap salary cap brought on by the pandemic,  the team has had to walk a tightrope all season long when it comes to managing the salary cap.

The Leafs would have looked like geniuses if their bet on the salary cap came through. When they made this bet, a new TV deal, NHL Gambling, and Expansion were all on the horizon. The cap was going to skyrocket and the Leafs were going reap a ton of benefits from their foresight.

Then the the pandemic happened and the salary cap was frozen. The Leafs were in such good shape that they were still able to add TJ Brodie and ice the deepest team in the league, but it’s not hard to imagine being able to add another eight million dollar player under different circumstances.

Tampa Bay’s Circumvention of the Cap

The Leafs deserve full credit for being manipulating the cap within the confines of the rules, but what Tampa is doing is an absolute joke, and it makes the NHL look bad.

It looks worse that they are promoting it:

Nikita Kucherov has a nine million dollar cap hit as one of the NHL’s best players.  He had hip surgery and sat out the entire year.  He’s been skating for over a month and is just happens to recover for the first game of the playoffs when there is no salary cap.

Stamkos missed the final 18 games.  In the NHL, you can put players on the Long Term Injured Reserve (LTIR) and then most of their contracts don’t count against the cap, allowing you to sign or trade for other players.

The playoffs have no salary cap, so there is nothing from stopping you from sitting $10 million on the LTIR and then adding to your lineup.  Both Lightning stars were too injured to play last week, but are fine now that there is no cap to worry about.

Now, this is all within the rules, because, technically, who can say that Kucherov really was game ready before next week? But come on.  After winning their Cup last year, the Lightning had to put actual borderline star players on waivers.  Lucky for them no one wanted to take on the money and term left on Tyler Johnson’s contract (although the fact that no one would claim such a player for free is another joke on the NHL).

Another thing Tampa has going for them is that they have a very low state tax which has allowed them to sign all their players to team-friendly deals that see them get just as much actual money in their bank accounts as they would have gotten if they signed elsewhere for more.

The league needs standards that equalize this, and they need to shut the loophole that saw Nikita Kucherov magically stay injured until his nine million dollar salary didn’t matter.  The best team in the NHL is basically playing with a stacked deck and though nothing can be done about it now, the loophole should at least be closed to prevent this situation from happening again in the future.