Salary cap crunch looming for Leafs
Here’s a stat for you: Now that Mitch Marner has finally agreed to a six-year contract worth US$65.358 million, there are now 13 players in the National Hockey League with a cap hit of $10 million or more. Of those, nine are playing on teams that did not make the post-season a year ago.
That’s the bad news if you’re the Toronto Maple Leafs.
The good news, however, is that three of the four players who did make the playoffs are playing in Toronto (San Jose’s Erik Karlsson is the other).
In other words, the Leafs have so far been the exception to the rule that states if you pay your star players too much money, there won’t be enough in the kitty to fill out the third and fourth lines. And it’s now up to GM Kyle Dubas to keep it that way.
That’s where the focus now shifts. This isn’t about whether Marner and Matthews, who are entering Year One of their new contracts, will earn the many zeros on their paycheques. This is about whether Dubas will earn his.
Signing Tavares, Matthews and Marner — and even William Nylander — turned out to be fairly easy. The challenge will come next summer, when five of the team’s defencemen need new contracts and two years from now, when Frederik Andersen hits free agency, and suddenly Dubas is digging through the couch cushions looking for cap space.
It’s a challenge that GMs Stan Bowman and Jim Rutherford know all too well.
With their top four forwards eating up 50 per cent of the cap, the Leafs now have the same problems facing Chicago and Pittsburgh, albeit with one small difference: They haven’t won a Stanley Cup. They haven’t even advanced past the first round.
And unless the cap significantly rises in the next couple of years, don’t expect that to change.
It wasn’t a coincidence that the teams in last year’s Stanley Cup final did not have a single player earning more than $7.5 million. But also keep in mind that neither St. Louis nor Boston had a No. 1 overall draft pick on their rosters — much less two of them.
Toronto’s salary imbalance is a problem, especially if the cap continues to remain stagnant. But at the same time, it’s not exactly a bad problem to have. No GM in the history of the NHL ever complained about having to pay top dollar for a player who produces.
Really, what was the alternative? Matthews and Marner are not David Clarkson and Jason Blake. This isn’t Phil Kessel and Dion Phaneuf getting more money than they are worth on the open market.
These are not deals that might look worse as the years go on. In fact, it’s probably the exact opposite.
Regardless of what they make, Toronto is a better team with Matthews, Marner and Tavares than without them. If the team wins a Cup, these are the three players who will lead the way.
This is their team now. It’s up to them to get it done. mtraikos@postmedia.com twitter.com/Michael_Traikos