The Toronto Maple Leafs off-season begins with many questions, but only one of them is of any interest:
Mainly, how are the Toronto Maple Leafs going to make the "significant changes" that they (vaguely) promised to make at a *(very)* embarrassing end-of-season press conference?
Auston Matthews and William Nylander have just been locked up long-term.
Morgan Rielly, John Tavares and Mitch Marner all have no movement claues. No one has yet confirmed that ex-GM Kyle Dubas gave out no-movement clauses to the team's janitorial and IT staff as well.
However, before any of these questions can be answered, we must evaluate the Toronto Maple Leafs salary cap situation (all info from capfriendly.com).
The Toronto Maple Leafs Salary Cap and Contract Information and Update
The NHL's salary cap for the 2024-25 season will be $87.7 million dollars.
The Toronto Maple Leafs currently have $18.5 million in cap-space.
They also have an additional $7 million which is among the worst spent $7 million in the NHL. It's somewhat annoying that people constantly harp on the Leafs decision to pay five players the majority of their cap space, but when people bring that up, they never mention how the Leafs have $25 million to spend regardless.
They also don't mention that by scratching Ilya Samsonov, TJ Brodie, Ryan Reaves and Connor Timmins the Leafs had $11 million on their bench in Game 6.
The Leafs have eight restricted free-agents to deal with this summer; Pontus Holmber, Nick Robertson, Connor Dewar, Timothy Liljegren, Max Ellis, Alex Steeves, Max Lajoie, and Keith Petruzzelli.
The Leafs have 12 unrestricted free-agents: Max Domi, Tyler Bertuzzi, Mark Giordano, TJ Brodie, Joel Edmundson, Ilya Lyubushkin, Martin Jones, Ilya Samsonov, John Klingberg, Matt Murray, Kyle Clifford and Dylan Gambrell.
The Toronto Maple Leafs currently have a contact count of 33. The NHL allows teams to have 50 contracts signed, so the Leafs have room to sign or trade for 17 players this summer.
With 22 contracts that are up, the Leafs will be forced to let some of these players go no matter what.
Finally, draft picks. The Leafs have traded a lot of them.
They have their first this season, but they don't have their second or third round picks. They do have their fourth and 3 x fifth rounders, however.
The Leafs have no sixth rounder, but 2 x seventh rounders.
Next year is even worse: The Leafs already traded their first, second, third and fourth picks.
And that is your Salary Cap Update for June the 9th 2024.