It’s Long Past Time for the Toronto Maple Leafs to Extend Stars
By James Tanner
The Toronto Maple Leafs have had a horrible summer and it’s long past time to give their fans some good news.
The Toronto Maple Leafs were always going to have trouble this summer with so many pending free-agents.
There just wasn’t any good way to move on from Schenn, Holl, O’Reilly, Acciari and Kerfoot without making the team worse, but signing all those guys was never really an option.
Therefore, this was always going to be a challenging summer. Still, no one made Brendan Shanahan make the dumbest decision of his life, and no one then forced panic-replacement Brad Treleving to spend like a drunken sailor in free-agency.
But the least they could do is sign Auston Matthews and William Nylander and give us something to be happy about.
It’s Long Past Time for the Toronto Maple Leafs to Extend Stars
It’s really bizarre this is taking so long.
Matthews makes $11.6 right now, and McDavid makes $12.5. Matthews is going to get $13.5 and sign for five years. Everyone knows this, so let’s make it happen.
Sure, we’d all like it to be for eight years, but what can you do?
As for Nylander, you can’t trade him, and you can’t let him walk for nothing, so you have to sign him.
If he wants $10 million per year, give him $10 million per year. I don’t understand why everyone is so upset about that. It’s a good number and he deserves it.
The fact is, he’s a 28 year-old 40 goal scorer who might even get slightly better than he already is. He’s one of the best players in franchise history and he’s already been underpaid for years.
Since he took a haircut on his last deal while all his peers got overpaid, he shouldn’t budge. The Leafs owe him, and he is worth the money. This shouldn’t take long.
If the Toronto Maple Leafs were smart – and signing John Klingberg to more money than Matt Dumba eventually got does call that into question – they would sign both players this week and announce twin extensions at a really fun press conference that gets the horrible taste of this summer out of the mouths of their fans.
Next. The Leafs Can Never Get Away From Their Horrible Draft Record. dark
The Leafs are definitely going to sign both players, so they might as well stop messing around and get it done. If they really want to impress me, they can sign them both to eight year deals, although I figure that is pretty unlikely at this point.