NHL teams bracing for Marner effect
The word is they’re waiting. And watching.
Tuesday was the deadline for teams to tender a qualifying offer to restricted free agents. A day later, those same RFAs could begin meeting with other teams with the purpose of signing an offer sheet.
The Toronto Maple Leafs will obviously be paying attention to what Mitch Marner does during this period. But they won’t be the only ones with eyes on him.
What Marner ends up doing will have implications. Not just for the Leafs, but for the rest of the league’s top free agents, who believe Marner is setting the market for what promises to be a lucrative summer for players coming off entry level contracts.
Consider the crop of restricted free agents who are coming off their entry level contracts.
We’re talking about a 44-goal scorer (Patrik Laine), a 41-goal scorer and top-20 point producer (Brayden Point), a two-time 30-goal scorer (Kyle Connor), two other forwards who ranked among the top 20 in points this season (Marner and Mikko Rantanen), another two who fell within the top 31 (Sebastian Aho and Matthew Tkachuk), as well as a Stanley Cup-winning goalie in Jordan Binnington and a defenceman in McAvoy who logged the most minutes on a team that lost in Game 7 of the final.
Marner is at the top of the list. Not because he’s necessarily the best of the bunch, but because he’s likely to demand the most money (believed to be in the neighbourhood of US$11.5 million) and also apparently has the intestinal fortitude to fight for what he’s worth.
“These kind of deals aren’t going to happen in June or July,” Hurricanes general manager Don Waddell said of Aho during last weekend’s draft in Vancouver. “The good thing is, I don’t think we’re terribly far apart. They want to get a deal done as much as we want to get a deal done. But there are a lot of other things in the league that they want to pay attention to and monitor.”
We could be in for a watershed moment in the NHL. It used to be that because restricted free agents had limited rights, they didn’t have leverage when it came time to negotiating a new contract. Now they’re getting paid as if there’s a line of prospective teams waiting outside their agents’ offices.