With every Buffalo Sabres signing, it continues to make the Toronto Maple Leafs look like the smartest franchise in hockey.
A few days ago, the Buffalo Sabres signed Tage Thompson to a seven-year deal, worth $7.142M AAV, making him a more expensive player than the Toronto Maple Leafs William Nylander. (LOL!)
Thompson is a unique player, don’t get me wrong.
At 6-foot-7, 220 pounds, he has crazy size for an NHL winger. However, after four seasons, Thompson was closer to being an AHLer than one of the higher paid wingers in the league.
After four seasons played, Thompson had only scored 18 goals and registered 35 points. The 2016 NHL Entry Draft was stacked with talent who had already been playing at a high-level by 2020, but Thompson wasn’t part of that bunch.
Then out of nowhere, Thompson scored 38 goals and had 68 points, leading a terrible Sabres team in goals and points. It was a magical season for him, but it’s probably something that he’s not going to sustain for the next seven years.
Sabres Continue to Make the Toronto Maple Leafs Look Good
You’d think the Sabres would have learned from their mistake of giving Jeff Skinner $9M AAV for eight years, but instead they have double-downed. It’s possible that Skinner has a few more 30-goal seasons in him, but that amount of money for a one-dimensional player is insane.
Nazem Kadri just signed for $2M AAV less and will contribute twice as more value than Skinner on a nightly basis, so it shows you just how outrageous that contract is, and that the Thompson contract will probably be just as bad.
If you look at the Toronto Maple Leafs roster and think that any of their players are overpaid, think again.
Auston Matthews ($11.64M) and Mitch Marner’s ($10.9M) are underpayments. Matthews just won the Hart Trophy, while Marner has been the best winger in the NHL for the past two seasons. If both players were in the NBA, they would be “max-contract” guys.
However, instead, they’re $3-4M per year away from the max, which over time is close to a $15-20M underpayment of their contract.
William Nylander’s $6.9M deal continues to get better everyday. He’s only one year older than Tage Thompson, but has already had two 30-plus goal seasons and has 343 points in 439 games. That’s a 0.78 points per game average (PPG), compared to Thompson’s 0.46 PPG.
The only contract you could say that is overpaid is John Tavares, yet he took less money to play in Toronto than anywhere else. There’s no way that Skinner and Thompson were getting more money on the open-market, plus Tavares has continued to be close to a point-per-game player for his entire Leafs career.
Not only that, but he’s averaging 35 goals per 82 games as a Leaf and is the captain of the team. His leadership and consistency is something that makes him worth $11M every day of the week.
With Thompson and Skinner eating up $16M of their salary-cap for the next five years, the Sabres have continued to show how not to manage a salary cap.
If you think being a Leafs fan is tough, imagine being a Sabres fan. Sure, Toronto hasn’t won a round in 19 years, but Buffalo hasn’t even made the playoffs in 11 years and that number will be 12 years by the of this year.