New York Rangers: Welcome to the new NHL
By Steve Paulus
A Toronto case study
But does it work? So far it hasn’t for them. Toronto is the case study for the new NHL with Tampa not far behind. The Maple Leafs overloaded with high priced talent and all of their young inexpensive stars became young expensive stars in a nano-second.
With John Tavares, Auston Matthews and William Nylander making about $29.3 million, that trio is taking up 36% of the Leaf’s payroll. Add in an $11 million salary for Mitch Marner and they will be committing about half of their payroll to four players.
The Leafs can afford to pay reasonable salaries to four more forwards (Alex Kerfoot, Andrea Johnsson, Kasperi Kapanen and Zach Hyman) and they are locked into a serviceable, but merely adequate quintet of defensemen after Morgan Rielly makes his $5 million. Good luck next summer when the Leafs will have only one of the current defenseman (Rielly) under contract.
When the Rangers play the Leafs this year, after the top eight forwards, you will be seeing a lot of Kenny Agostino, Frederik Gauthier and a 36-year old Jason Spezza.
And did I mention that the Leafs are within $3.8 million of the cap ceiling and they have not signed Mitch Marner yet?
How are the Leafs doing? They’ve suffered two consecutive first round seven game defeats at the hands of the Boston Bruins. And that was with teams that were deeper and not burdened with as many top heavy contracts. Since the season ended, they have traded Nazem Kadri, Patrick Marleau, Connor Brown and Nikita Zaitsev and lost Jake Gardiner, Ron Hainsey and Tyler Ennis to free agency.
Kyle Dubas should get some credit for unloading Marleau’s contract and for getting a decent return for Kadri in Tyson Barrie and Alex Kerfoot,. In doing so it also means the Leafs won’t have a first round pick for two years (the 2019 pick went to Los Angeles in the Jake Muzzein deal). And if anything, the Leafs need good young players on Entry Level Contracts.
Record setters…until April
The Tampa Bay Lightning are lauded as the best example of building a Cup contending team in the salary cap era. Steve Yzerman took advantage of a favorable tax rate along with team loyalty to build a club that won 62 games and finished 21 points ahead of the second best team in the NHL.
Despite bestowing huge contracts on superstars Steven Stamkos and Nikita Kucherov along with multi-year deals for Victor Hedman and Ryan McDonagh, these players took less money to stay in Tampa. But even with all of Yzerman’s salary cap machinations, they are dangerously close to the cap ceiling with Brayden Point still looking for a contract. 2020-21 will be even more of a challenge with Mikhail Sergachev and Vezina Trophy winner Andrei Vasilevskiy looking for new deals.
The Lightning excelled in the regular season, but went out in a shocking four game sweep at the hands of the Columbus Blue Jackets. No one is saying that their ship has sailed, but the cap challenges that they face will continue to hamper the team moving forward.