Top 10 Worst Reasons Given for the Toronto Maple Leafs Slide
By James Tanner
2. The Salary Cap
The Toronto Maple Leafs remain the NHL’s only team without a bad long term contract. The Leafs are the best team in the NHL at managing the cap, but whenever they lose it suddenly becomes a problem again. The fact is, they are losing because they have less than two goals per game so far, which is something that is luck based and won’t last much longer.
Their salary cap structure isn’t preventing them from scoring.
As for depth, well, Jason Spezza, Wayne Simmonds, Pierre Engvall, Michael Bunting, Rasmus Sandin, Travis Dermott and Timothy Liljegren have all been fantastic so far, and they barely combine to make $6 million. Clearly a lack of money didn’t prevent them from icing a solid bottom of the roster.
Jack Campbell and William Nylander are paid so cheaply that if you work their average into the Big Three and make it the Big Five, the Toronto Maple Leafs actually have an average salary of their five best players that is in line with all other competitive teams.
How many of those teams also have a trio of $5 million dollar star defenseman? $40 million for four players might sound crazy, but when you add in three defenseman and a goalie, you’re paying $7.25 million each for your eight best players, which is half a million more than what Tampa pays (roughly). Considering the tax breaks they can give their players, that’s not too bad. I rest my case.
Nothing will ever change the fact that in the NHL the 100th best player and the worst player in the league are not far enough apart to warrant spending a vastly different sum of money on. Dumping as much money as you can into star players continues to be the correct way to operate in a salary cap, and a run of bad luck doesn’t change anything about it, other than perception.
The Salary cap complaints are laughable because the Leafs are one of the NHL’s best and deepest teams. As long as ownership doesn’t panic and pull the plug, time will prove this correct.