Can you win a Stanley Cup when four players make up half your payroll? Dave Feschuk examines the Leafs’ chances.
No recent Cup contender has paid its top four as much as the Leafs will — here’s why
Now that the contract stalemates are over and the lucrative deals are signed, we’ve come to the moment when the richly rewarded core of the Toronto Maple Leafs must begin to answer an important question: Is it possible for a team to win a Stanley Cup with its top four highest-paid players earning half the salary cap?
We say half, but we mean 49.7 per cent. When you add up the annual average value of the contracts of Auston Matthews, John Tavares, Mitch Marner and William Nylander, you get $40.5 million — a shade under 50 per cent of the NHL’s 2019-20 salary cap of $81.5 million (all dollars U.S.). That is, to put it mildly, a pretty penny for a quartet of forwards.
And if you’re looking at recent historical precedent, there isn’t a successful playoff team that’s been built in quite the same way. Dominik Zrim at CapFriendly.com, the indispensable site Zrim co-founded with Jamie Davis, put together a list of Cup winners and finalists circa 2012-13, when the current collective bargaining agreement came into effect. That’s a collection of 14 teams that either won the Cup or were in the building when it was hoisted.
And the bad news, if you’re a Maple Leafs fan, is that the bulk of those teams took a decidedly less top-heavy approach in team building. Twelve of the 14 teams had a top four that earned 41 per cent of the cap or less. And while none of the 14 teams that’s made the Cup final since 2012 had a single player banking an annual average value (AAV) north of $10 million, this season the Maple Leafs have three such high earners.
“I understand that people look at it and say no team has done it this way before,” Leafs GM Kyle Dubas said earlier this month.
Which is not to say relatively topheavy teams haven’t gotten it done. Consider the top-heaviest of the circa-2012 championship group, the Pittsburgh Penguins. When they won backto-back Cups in 2016 and 2017, the Penguins’ top four AAVs made up 45 per cent and 44 per cent of the salary cap, respectively — a high-income neighbourhood not far removed from where the Leafs now reside.
It didn’t hurt that Sidney Crosby, only the best player of the era, signed his current deal, complete with its 12-year term and its beyond reasonable $8.7million cap hit, in 2012 before the current CBA was in place. As much as those Penguins teams were party to considerable economic disparity, GM Jim Rutherford said they still managed to forge championship chemistry.
“It’s how we approach it and how we sell it to the players,” Rutherford said. “It doesn’t matter what you make. And it doesn’t matter about winning scoring titles and individual awards and things like that. Players are remembered by how many times they win Stanley Cups.”
If the Cup is what people remember, the cap’s a reality GMs can’t ever forget.
It wasn’t during a glorious run that saw the L.A. Kings win the Stanley Cup in 2012 and 2014 that Dean Lombardi, then the team’s president and GM, tossed out a novel idea to a group of players due championship-worthy raises.
“It’s like I told my players when we won, ‘I’m just going to throw all the money in the middle of the room and you guys figure it out,’ ” Lombardi said. “No, it’s true. I said to the guys, ‘We’re not cutting corners here. We’ll spend every nickel up to the cap. You guys figure it out if you want to stay together.’ And obviously there are so many other interests involved that that’s probably not going to happen.”
At the time, Drew Doughty was the team’s highest-paid player at an AAV of $7 million. And L.A.’s top four earners — the others being Anze Kopitar, Jonathan Quick and Mike Richards — took up about 39 per cent of the cap. But if there’s a bevy of reasons why the Kings haven’t won a playoff series since they captured that 2014 Cup, Lombardi said the list includes what he calls “economic chemistry” — how the divvying up of finite cap dollars affects the dynamic of a dressing room.
“Economic chemistry is critical,” said Lombardi, who was fired in 2018 after 12 years in L.A. and is now a senior adviser for the Philadelphia Flyers. “Because there’s no doubt our room changed after we won. And there’s no doubt in my mind it came down to the distribution of the dollars.”
Indeed, by 2016, when Kopitar signed a deal that paid him an annual average of $10 million, the numbers at the top of the Kings salary chart were decidedly bigger than they were when the championship run began. Doughty signed a deal with an $11-million AAV in 2018.
“In hockey, the idea of caring about each other and caring about the right things is more paramount than in any other team sport, in my opinion. But what happens when you have a spread of one guy making $13 million, or what have you, and the guy down the end who’s busting his tail making $700,000 — I don’t care who you are, there’s a rift,” Lombardi said.
To that end, some saw it as a lesson in team building that the Vegas Golden Knights made the Stanley Cup final in their inaugural year in 2017-18 with no player earning an AAV over $5.75 million and a top four that commanded a mere 26 per cent of the cap — the lowest among champions and finalists under the current CBA. George McPhee, the Golden Knights president, said the lack of a star-based hierarchy “had a lot to do” with that team’s success.
“I remember having a conversation with Dean Lombardi about five years ago, talking about whether you’d be better off with a team full of B-plus players than a team with three or four A-plus players and then it drops down to D players to make the cap work,” said McPhee in an interview.
That’s not to say McPhee is philosophically against having “A-plus” players on a team. During his time as GM of the Washington Capitals he signed Alex Ovechkin to the 13-year, $124-million mega-deal that runs through 2020-21. But considering Ovechkin has won the Rocket Richard Trophy as the league’s top goal scorer in six of the past seven years, his AAV of $9.5 million equates to one of the best star contracts in the sport. Ovie’s Capitals, of course, beat McPhee’s Golden Knights for the Cup in 2018.
“If you want harmony in the locker room, I think it’s important to try and have a balanced approach,” McPhee said. “I remember (former Toronto Blue Jays GM) Pat Gillick years ago saying that he’d rather have three guys making $5 million each than one guy making $15 million. You’re probably better off.”
Doug Armstrong, GM of the champion St. Louis Blues, said his team’s Cup-winning cap situation was made tenable in part because two of his three highest-paid players, Vladimir Tarasenko and Alex Pietrangelo, signed long-term deals in 2015 and 2013, respectively, so their AAVs of $7.5 million and $6.5 million have come to look modest.
A lot has changed in the NHL since those deals were inked. In 2017, for instance, the Edmonton Oilers signed 20-yearold Connor McDavid to a $100million contract with a leaguetopping AAV of $12.5 million. In a league that once generally reserved such paydays for older unrestricted free agents, let’s just say the McDavid deal unleashed a lucrative tide that’s raised the proverbial boats captained by an armada of young restricted free agents, among them Matthews, Marner and Nylander.
“It’s a huge shift,” said Armstrong. “Now — right, wrong or indifferent — the large piece of the pie is going to players much younger. And that’s more of an issue internally in the locker room that the players have to deal with. The players making the most money are no longer your senior players. And it’s something that as management, you really can’t control it. But you have to react to it.”
How will the Maple Leafs react now that four players, three of them age 23 or younger, are gobbling up half the team’s available pie? Can a team pay out a trio of eightfigure cap hits and lift a Cup to boot?
Jason Spezza, the veteran centreman who joined the Leafs on a minimum salary to come and find out, answers those kinds of questions with another one: Why not?
“Everybody’s going to say, ‘You have to win this way,’ until it’s done a different way,” Spezza said. “And then that becomes the only way. When a team wins with their four highest-paid guys taking up most of the cap, then everybody’s going to say, ‘It can be done.’ Until then, there’s always going to be questions.”