The Toronto Maple Leafs are going to have to make a decision about Nick Robertson soon, or a decision will be made for them.
The 23-year-old winger and the team are heading into arbitration on Aug. 3 – where the Maple Leafs will try to state their case that Robertson is actually a worse player than he thinks he is and deserves a significantly lower salary than the player wants. And, well, Robertson’s camp will be trying to squeeze every dollar possible from the Leafs.
Robertson, a restricted free agent, is coming off a season where he played a career-high 69 games, scored 15 goals, but only earned 22 points while averaging 12 minutes of ice-time a game. There’s not a whole lot of ground to stand on for him to make several millions of dollars, but there are at least signs of a solid player there.
So, the big question is what should we expect for Robertson’s next contract?
It boils down to the team and player taking one of two available paths: Either they agree on a contract before Sunday and avoid arbitration, or they go through the terrible process of arbitration to go through it all again next summer.
If the Leafs and Robertson go through arbitration, and since it was team-elected arbitration, the two sides are limited to a one-year deal being the end result, and the salary of that contract will be decided on by a third-party arbitrator.
But, they do have some motivation to get a deal done before that happens, since it opens the possibility of signing Robertson for multiple years. If that happens, though, what could we expect?
Thankfully, the people over at Evolving-Hockey released their contract projections at the beginning of the offseason and we can get a sense of the likelihood of the length of the hypothetical contract, and what the estimated salary is at that amount of term for Robertson’s contract.
1 Year | 2 Years | 3 Years | 4 Years | 5 Years | 6 Years | 7 Years | 8 Years | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Likelihood | 19% | 49% | 10% | 9% | 6% | 6% | 0% | 1% |
Cap hit | $1.521M | $2.173M | $2.61M | $3.296M | $3.549M | $3.277M | $3.435M | $4.396M |
It would be very abnormal for the Leafs to sign a player that was a healthy scratch for all but three playoff games just a few months ago, to anything more than a two-year deal, and that is reflected in the projection.
By far the likeliest outcome, according to this projection, is a two-year contract with a $2.173 million AAV, roughly. But, again, that’s if the Leafs and Robertson can come to an agreement before arbitration this Sunday.
With approximately $2.9 million in cap space currently, the Maple Leafs may be cutting it very close to the cap ceiling if Robertson gets a deal around the likely projection, so maybe the team is very fine with them pinching pennies for one season to try and find out what Robertson is through another 82 games.
There is still some sense of potential with Robertson, since he missed so much time to injury and played a limited role in the NHL, which could mean the Leafs having a costly mistake if they didn’t lock the player up for multiple years. Or, he might not even get an NHL contract by this time next year.