Hockey analyst, podcaster and former NHL player Paul Bissonnette has said on a recent episode of Spittin Chiclets that the Toronto Maple Leafs should pay upcoming unrestricted free agent Mitch Marner more money annually than Oilers superstar Leon Draisaitl.
While discussing how hard he was on Marner following the Toronto Maple Leafs crushing playoff exit last year at the hands of the Bruins, Bissonnette went on to suggest the team should give the star winger a payday larger than Draisaitl's new deal he inked in the summer.
Bissonnette is an analyst on NHL on TNT in the States while also being the co-host of the biggest hockey podcast in the world, Spittin Chiclets.
He also played in the NHL himself, playing just over 200 games in his career over the span of six seasons, racking up 22 points in total.
NHL Analyst with extremely hot take Toronto Maple Leafs signing Mitch Marner
As Leafs fans are well aware of, Mitch Marner becomes an unrestricted free agent at the end of this season. He is in the midst of the final year of a six-year, $65.41M contract signed in September of 2019 which gave him an annual average value of $10.893M.
At the time, the deal made him the third-highest paid player on the team behind Auston Matthews and John Tavares and he was the seventh-highest cap-hit in the league. Marner has come out of the gate hot in his contract year, putting up 26 points in the teams first 20 games, good enough for a 106 point pace over a full 82 games.
The Leon Draisaitl contract that Bissonnette alluded to was the eight-year, $112M contract the Oilers centre signed in September of this year. The contract is the second largest in total dollars in league history and the $14M AAV is the highest in league history. It would be very hard to imagine a world in which Mitch Marner gets that type of money.
When Marner signed his deal in 2019 with an AAV of $10.893M, his cap-hit percentage was approximately 13.365% of the then $81.5M salary cap. The league's salary cap has since gone up and is currently at $88M for the 2024-25 season, but there are rumours and reports that number could see a big boost before the start of next season. As per the CBA, it's set to go to $92.4M, but Sportsnet's Elliotte Freidman has reported it could go as high as the $95M-$97M range.
If the salary cap doesn't see the rumoured big boost and it moves to $92.4M like it is currently supposed to, an AAV of around $12.5M would be a very similar percentage of the cap as the deal Marner inked in 2019, and it would also be an annual pay increase of over $1.5M. Not too shabby.
Ultimately, the $12.5 number seems right. The Leafs will probably sign Marner at a price that is halfway between what Nylander and Matthews make, which would be roughly.....$12.5. That seems fair and realistic. The should probably try to get it done as soon as possible however, because the price isn't going to go down.