No discounting Nylander’s will
Rich deal puts winger in elite company after Shanahan’s hometown appeal flops
The standoff began with an appeal. With William Nylander still unsigned as the Maple Leafs opened their season in the early days of October, club president Brendan Shanahan made a public suggestion to Nylander and Toronto’s other “young leaders.”
Take less money to stay together as salary-cap compliant Stanley Cup contenders. Sacrifice a few bucks today, in other words, and walk together forever as legends.
It was a fine enough sales pitch in theory. So far it’s 0-for-1 in reality.
You can say a lot about the six-year deal Nylander ultimately signed before Saturday’s deadline. You can call the contract necessary, for sure. With an impending salary-cap crunch still to come, this season might ultimately go down as this exciting era’s best chance at a Cup. To make that run without a key piece could have been the stuff of generational regret.
Some have lauded the contract as tradeable, too, thanks a front-loaded structure that will see Nylander earn $17 million by July 1 (all dollars U.S.). Mind you, if your first positive thought about a contract is that it’s moveable, maybe it says something about the way you view the player who signed it.
What you can’t call the contract is a hometown discount. As one competing agent said of the deal, throwing a compliment toward Nylander’s agent, Lewis Gross: “The Leafs overpaid.”
As Gross emerged from his negotiation-window media blackout on Sunday, he was asked about Shanahan’s October appeal for financial sacrifice.
“Brendan has his opinion, and I respect Brendan as an executive as well as an ex-player,” said Gross. “But I didn’t really think about (Shanahan’s opening-day appeal) that much, to be honest.”
In other words, there’s not a competent agent on the planet who would advise a client to do anything other than what Nylander did these past two months: maximize his value in the time allotted. Gross, mind you, said he was ultimately “surprised” that the deal was only done minutes before Saturday’s 5 p.m. deadline, after which Nylander would have been ineligible to play in the NHL this season and would have mulled a handful of standing offers to
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play for European clubs. Why did it take so long? “Not everybody always agrees. Sometimes to find a point where we all agree takes time … Bridge deals were looked into. Longer deals were looked into. To find a common ground and a common (annual average value) and something we could live with, ultimately it went down to the last minute.”
It only went as long as it did because Nylander was willing to hold firm. The club held most of the leverage, and as the dispute dragged on, you didn’t have to go far to hear exNHLers in the broadcast media deriding Nylander for dragging out negotiations. More than a few commentators suggested Nylander was getting bad advice from both Gross and Nylander’s father, Michael, a former NHL player.
But let’s consider that charge of bad advice. Around the time William Nylander began negotiating with the Maple Leafs the club was offering something in the range of a six-year deal worth an annual average of $6 million — a total of $36 million. When he signed Saturday, he was the proud owner of a contract that will pay him a guaranteed total of a little short of $42 million.
After all those years Mike Babcock has been urging Nylander to “dig in” and be “a man” — you can’t say the kid never listened. Nylander made something in the range of an additional $6 million by refusing to do what NHL players almost always do: cave.
As one prominent agent said Sunday: “I wish all my players had Willie’s balls.”
Gross, hearing that assessment reiterated by a reporter, laughed a little over the phone.
“For a player of that age to have the strength to do what he did, it’s really incredible,” Gross said of the 22-year-old Calgary- born Swede. “I have so much respect for Willie. I’ve been doing this 35 years and the strength he showed in this negotiation was just incredible. I really have a tremendous amount of respect for Willie and his beliefs in what he thought was fair. He stood his ground. It makes my job easier to have a client like Willie.”
That’s not to say the deal can’t work for both sides, so long as Nylander performs at a level commensurate with his pay grade. Still, the pay grade puts him into elite company. It didn’t go unnoticed by industry insiders that the cap hit on years two through six of Nylander’s deal is $6.9 million — 8.9 per cent of the current NHL salary cap of $79.5 million. Who else recently negotiated a deal worth 8.9 per cent of his contract-year cap? That’d be David Pastrnak, Nylander’s close friend and fellow skill-first winger, who signed a six-year contract with the Bruins in 2017 worth an annual average of $6.67 million. Pastrnak, who went into Sunday with 19 goals, third-most in the NHL, has already arguably outplayed the value of that deal. Nylander has never scored more than 22 goals in an 82-game season.
As more than one agent noted this weekend, the annual average value of Nylander’s contract isn’t technically $6.9 million — on paper it’s $7.5 million, a $45-million deal minus the $3.2 million he’ll forego for sitting out the opening two months of the season. That $7.5-million paper average makes a decent run at the $8.5million annual average currently paid to Leon Draisaitl, the Oilers winger who stood as another comparable in negotiations. Draisaitl went into Sunday tied for 19th in the NHL points race. As one player agent said of Nylander’s contract: “It’s better than Draisaitl’s.” By what rationale? Nylander secured $24.3 million in signing bonuses; Draisaitl got $14 million. And Nylander will hit unrestricted free agency sooner than Draisaitl, which presents the opportunity for an earlier pay bump.
If Nylander has outdone Pastrnak and arguably Draisaitl in negotiations, it won’t be easy outproducing either on the ice. That’s for another day, though. For now, the Leafs can make a Cup run with a full squad. And as for Shanahan’s vision of a young core that would sacrifice a modicum of personal gain for glory?
Don’t bet on impending restricted free agents Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner to set the hometown discount precedent.
Bet on arduous negotiations. If the Nylander saga tells future Toronto contract seekers anything about GM Kyle Dubas’s negotiating style, it’s this: The GM will lowball, which calls for hardball.