How William Nylander's New Contract Affects the Maple Leafs' Salary Cap for 2024-25 and How Lessons From the Flat Cap Era Will Help
With Nylander accounting for $11.5 million on the books for next season, the Leafs will have at least 53 percent of their budget committed to their top-four forwards.
When Mitch Marner signed a six-year extension that carried an average annual value of $10.893 million per season on Sept. 13, 2019, it represented a 13.37 percent portion of the NHL's $81.5 million salary cap that season. Marner, along with Auston Matthews ($11.634 million), John Tavares ($11 million) and William Nylander ($6,962,366) accounted for a total of $40,489,366 of the Leafs' salary cap. It was a staggering 49.7 percent.
The defense at the time when those deals were signed by Maple Leafs by then-GM Kyle Dubas was that the cap was going to go up. And before the COVID-19 pandemic, that was shoring up to be the case. On Mar. 4, 2020, just weeks before the world shut down, NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly told reporters that the projections were between $84 and $88.2 million.
Nearly 1,600 days later, Matthews and William Nylander have new contracts with the Maple Leafs that will kick in at the beginning of the 2024-25 season. Matthews signed a four-year, $53 million extension back in August ($13.25 million per season) and Nylander signed a new eight-year, $92 million pact ($11.5 million per season) on Monday. With the first meaningful increase of no more than 5 percent in the salary cap expected for next season, Toronto's core four players will account for $46.653 million out of a projected $87.675 million cap max for next season. That accounts for 53.2 percent of the team's max expenditures on an active roster, leaving just $41.022 million for the remaining players.
To put that into perspective, that's slightly less than the $41.01 million that the Leafs had to work with after Marner signed his last deal in 2019.
So how did it get to this? Especially since the flat cap proved to everyone that the economics can change in an instant. Is this going to be a problem for the Maple Leafs next season?
According to Puckpedia.com, the Leafs have 14 players committed to their roster for next season at a combined cap hit of $66.438 million, leaving just $17.062 million to add between six and nine players. It's not a lot to work with. The Leafs will probably spend some of that to add another goaltender to play with Joseph Woll and the rest of it will have to go towards remaking a Leafs defense that only has commitments to Morgan Rielly, Jake McCabe, and Conor Timmins for next season.
But if the Leafs learned anything during the flat cap era, it's that there is no limit to how they can bend the salary cap to their competitive advantage,
Without the services of goaltender Matt Murray ($4.875 million) defensemen Jake Muzzin ($5.625 million) and John Klingberg ($4.15 million), the Leafs lead the NHL in a combined salary cap and long-term injured reserve (LTIR) pool at $97,035,175, per PuckPedia.com. Placing Murray on LTIR before this season got Toronto out of a cap jam. Shutting Klingberg down with a hip injury in November aided the Leafs in further roster flexibility. The club never went into any of these last few seasons expecting to dip into the LTIR pool with regularity, but they know it's just inevitable that injuries happen and they can utilize the exception if needed.
As far as making space for other players, the pandemic was a great exercise for the Leafs in creating space when needed.
On April 9, the Maple Leafs acquired forward Riley Nash from the Columbus Blue Jackets. The Jackets didn't need cap space and didn't put the veteran forward on long-term injured reserve, but Toronto acquired him and immediately placed him on LTIR, creating an effective cap increase of $2.75 million to add to their LTIR pool and Nash didn't play for Toronto until the playoffs.
It was the most creative way a team could make cap space for themselves in the middle of a season.
Although an $11.5 million cap hit for Nylander could be considered by some as high, the Maple Leafs felt it was worth betting on the player who has played some of his best hockey over his last 37 games and is on pace for finishing with a career-high 120 points.
"All we can do is tackle these things one at a time right when they came up" Maple Leafs GM Brad Treliving said of the club's future moves. "You're going to have a cap that increases but we're not blind to the fact that there are other areas of our team that you have to improve and we'll continue to do that."
The question then becomes not that the Leafs are overpaying their core, but rather if this is the core that they can win them a Stanley Cup.
"You folks can all debate it and I'm sure it will be hotly debated," Treliving said. "But at the end of the day when you can get a top player signed, it's a good day."
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