Matthews has power in contract play
A couple months back, as Toronto found itself in the throes of hard-core hockey contract talk, more than a couple of high-profile NHL agents looked at William Nylander’s just-completed contract and suggested it could be a harbinger of things to come.
Nylander and his representatives played hardball until the eleventh hour of a Dec. 1 signing deadline, in the end winning a six-year contract with a front-loaded payment structure and an annual average value of $6.9 million beyond this season. It was hardly the kind of hometown discount the Maple Leafs had been hoping he’d take. And to some industry observers far more astute than this one, it suggested hockey was moving into an era in which traditionally meek young stars would be more aggressive in wrestling away their slice of the NHL’s limited pie.
“I expect some of these kids will be more militant,” is how one agent char- acterized the coming generation of NHL high earners. It was the kind of talk that could give a fan of the Maple Leafs an ulcer.
Well, now it’s Auston Matthews’ turn at the negotiating table. And the buzz suggests the team and its 21-year-old star centreman are getting tantalizingly close to consummating a deal that would end months of speculation and bring more clarity to Toronto’s complicated financial picture. So maybe, to some ears, it’s been heartening to hear Matthews express something resem- bling team-first selflessness in his recent comments about the ongoing negotiations.
“There’s no secret there’s a cap,” Matthews told reporters on the weekend, asked about reports that his agents are in the midst of negotiating a contract extension with the club. “We’ve got a lot of great players on this team. We want to be a great team that makes the city proud and (contend) for a long time.”
Those words were spoken, keep in mind, after the focus of talks moved away from an eight-year deal, the maximum allowable under the current collective bargaining agreement, toward something in the range of five or six years.
Toronto’s coming salary-cap crunch has always figured to be difficult to navigate. In the hard-ceilinged world of the NHL, every contender eventually finds itself in the same kind of overcrowded boat, and it’s never long before perfectly good players are being thrown over the side as a matter of simple survival. So if pending restricted free
agents Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner took Nylander’s lead and decided to get militant in their approach to negotiations — well, that’d make for rough sailing aboard the S.S. Shanaplan.
The sudden talk of a shorter term is favourable for the team in one way; fewer years come with a smaller annual average salary-cap hit, which is important for a team that’s going to be up against the cap for many years to come. And if five-year deals were good enough for the likes of Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane when they were emerging from their entrylevel contracts — winning their first of three Stanley Cups under the terms of rookie-scale deals in 2010 — surely they’ll work for Matthews.
Still, let’s not kid ourselves, in an ideal world, the Leafs would clearly prefer an eight-year pact. Having Matthews under contract until he’s 29 would lock him up for his prime. It would give the Leafs enviable cost certainty while giving the player lucrative security. And don’t think for a minute that Matthews couldn’t, if he so chose, insist on signing an eight-year deal not too dissimilar from the one worth $100 million that Connor McDavid signed a couple of summers ago.
So it’s important to understand the reasons why Matthews is apparently verging on inking a shorter contract. For one, it’s only sensible that he’d be intrigued by the prospect of hitting unrestricted free agency and its historically outsized riches at, say, the age of 26 rather than the age of 29. (In a league that’s going younger and younger, there are agents advising clients that the further you are away from 30 as an unrestricted free agent, the better your chances of a massive payday).
For another, long-term deals can become obsolete quickly in the NHL, especially if the salary cap happens to rise. It was only a couple of summers ago that Nathan MacKinnon signed a seven-year deal worth $44 million. Now his annual average value of $6.3 million seems like the bargain of bargains.
There are other factors, too. The league’s U.S.-based TV deal will expire in 2021, and there’s optimism within the sport that its successor will be far more lucrative than the current agreement that contributes about $200 million annually into hockey-related revenue. With new entities circling in the rights-buying sphere, there’s a possibility, albeit hardly a guarantee, that a new deal could help boost the salary cap in the way a recent bump in the NBA’s TV deal saw an unprecedented explosion in player salaries. Even a smallerscale version of that basketball bonanza could change things quickly in the hockey world.
That’s mere speculation, of course. And here’s one thing we know for sure: The Leafs erred gravely in not signing Matthews and Marner before the season. The reality is that at the time, months into the tenure of rookie GM Kyle Dubas, the bulk of the franchise’s attention and energy were focused on two players: John Tavares and Nylander. The problem is that they weren’t focused on the franchise’s best two players. You can detect some resentment around that if you probe.
Tavares, after all, came to Toronto largely thanks to the presence of Matthews and Marner. The idea that they might be stuck taking less money because Tavares is taking up $11 million of annual space in an ever-shrinking boat — obviously it doesn’t sit well. And if the team points out that restricted free agents lack leverage, there’s the looming prospect of a July offer sheet should negotiations stall.
Matthews, in other words, only appears to be getting cheaper because the theoretical deal’s footprint is getting smaller, which means the Leafs have abandoned the ideal-world scenario and switched into survival mode, a shortterm solution that’ll create a longer-term problem sooner than anyone would like. If Matthews manages to get the $11 million annually that’s being bandied about on a fiveyear term, he’ll be scoring big. Marner, who’s waiting to piggyback off Matthews’ pact, ought to be overjoyed. Back when Toews and Kane signed their identical five-year deals nearing the end of their entry-level pacts, they got $6.3 million a year apiece, about 11 per cent of the going salary cap. If Matthews got that same percentage of next year’s cap — and the working projections have it around $82 million — he’d be worth about $9 million a year over five years.
Make no mistake: An $11million average on such a short deal would nothing short of a coup for the player. You could call it the Tavares premium. Or even, militant.