When the Maple Leafs signed John Tavares to a free-agent contract on July 1, 2018 — $77 million (U.S.) over seven years — it was a turning point in franchise history.
He became the highest-paid member of the team and the Leafs became Stanley Cup contenders. But the contract itself became a talking point, to put it politely.
It was quickly pointed out by the naysayers that no team had won the Cup with a player paid more than $10 million a year. Critics said the team was already strong at centre, with Auston Matthews and Nazem Kadri, so the money might have been better spent on the team’s weakness: defence. And there was concern the team’s young stars, seeing Tavares’s deal, would expect to be paid similarly.
Over the course of the next 14 months, they were: William Nylander missed the start of that season, ultimately holding out for a six-year, $45.1-million deal he signed in December; Matthews re-upped the next February, before his entry-level deal expired, on a five-year, $58.2-million deal; Mitch Marner missed the first few days of camp in 2019 before signing a six-year, $65.4-million deal.
The Leafs suddenly didn’t have just one player earning more than $10 million a season, they had three: Matthews at $11.364 million, Tavares at $11 million and Marner at $10.893 million. With Nylander at $6.9 million, their four highest-paid players were forwards. They became known colloquially as the Core Four.
Nothing like this had been done before — at least to this extreme — in the salary-cap era. Each team has the same amount it can spend in each season. Some teams don’t spend to the limit of the cap; most Stanley Cup contenders do.
But none spent it quite the way the Leafs did under general managers Kyle Dubas and, lately, Brad Treliving, who recently signed extensions for Matthews and Nylander and faces the same situation next season with Tavares and Marner.
The naysayers who said you wouldn’t win a Stanley Cup with a roster constructed like this so far have been proven correct. (Although those who predict none of the NHL’s 32 teams will win the Stanley Cup will be right 31 times.)
Recent Cup winners have done things quite differently than the Leafs, who will make their eighth straight post-season appearance starting Saturday in Boston.
There’s no arguing the Leafs are “top heavy,” says James Finch, of @AFPAnalytics, which advises teams on the value of players and the expected salary range of free agents.
Matthews, Tavares, Marner, and Nylander take up $40,505,616 of the $83.5-million the Leafs can spend, or 48.51 per cent of the cap. That is about 10 per cent higher than the Tampa Bay Lightning’s Stanley Cup-winning teams from 2020 and 2021, who spent 36.87 per cent of the cap on their top four forwards.
“Between Vegas, Colorado, Tampa twice, and St. Louis, the past five Stanley Cup winners would suggest that it might be best to have your top-four forwards counting in the low- to mid-30 percentages, not the high 40s,” Finch says.
“These teams all had an extra 10 per cent plus of the cap to spend on more forward depth and/or other positions on the roster in comparison to this year’s Toronto Maple Leafs.”
Notably, those teams focused more money on high-end defencemen.
The Blues, in 2019, spent more on defencemen ($27.6 million) than the Leafs ($24.7 million), with 29 per cent of their cap going to the likes of Alex Pietrangelo, Colton Parayko and Jay Bouwmeester.
The Lightning, with Norris Trophy winner Victor Hedman and Ryan McDonagh leading the way, committed 27 per cent of their cap space to the blue line. The Leafs were at 20 per cent and 25 per cent those years.
Cody Ceci was Toronto’s second-highest-paid defenceman in 2020, earning $4.5 million, and the Leafs used five mostly inexperienced defencemen earning less than $1 million (Rasmus Sandin, Travis Dermott, Calle Rosen, Justin Holl and Martin Marincin), a blue-line depth chart that scared no one.
Colorado, in 2022, outspent not just the Leafs but all recent Cup winners, committing 40 per cent of its payroll to defence. Cale Makar, at $9 million, was worth it, of course. But they had a veteran in Erik Johnson, and players in their prime like Josh Manson and Devon Toews. The Leafs were at a high-water mark in terms of spending on defence at 31 per cent, with Jake Muzzin, Morgan Rielly, T.J. Brodie and trade-deadline acquisition Mark Giordano as the core.
Vegas spent 30 per cent of its active cap on defencemen last year, to the Leafs’ 23 per cent, and their top-six defenders — Pietrangelo, Alec Martinez, Shea Theodore, Brayden McNabb, Zach Whitecloud and Nicolas Hague — were the envy of the NHL. None earned less than Hague’s $2.29 million.
The Leafs, meanwhile, were using defencemen on entry-level deals (Timothy Liljegren, Sandin, Dermott) or with bargain-basement salaries (Zach Bogosian, Giordano, Marincin).
It’s a get-what-you-pay-for world and the Leafs haven’t been able to spend a lot on their blue line.
“It’s just an efficiency game,” former Tampa GM Brian Lawton says. “That’s the way you have to look at your roster.”
The Leafs’ spending on defence this year is about 20 per cent, but it would have been higher had John Klingberg, signed to a one-year free-agent contract for $4.15 million last summer, been healthy. He dealt with bad hips requiring season-ending surgery in December.
“My own feeling is the mistake the Toronto Maple Leafs made was signing John Tavares,” says former NHL executive Craig Button, now an analyst on TSN. “Nothing wrong with John Tavares the player or anything wrong with how he’s played for the Toronto Maple Leafs. But did they need John Tavares? A lot of other decisions with respect to players leaving emanated because of the contract to John Tavares.”
Button’s point is that the money spent on Tavares might have been better spent elsewhere, namely defence.
“I’m not going to back off of it until they get two more defencemen that can play in the top two pairs. I don’t think Morgan Rielly is a No. 1 defenceman. I think he’s a No. 2. So they need a One and a Three.”
Looking toward next season, it’s clear Treliving will prioritize getting bigger defencemen, but he still won’t have a lot of money to spend on them, even with the cap rising to $87.7 million from $83.5 million. Forwards like Matthews and Nylander are getting big raises that more or less eat up the extra $4.2 million.
At this point, he has $11.95 million committed to Rielly, Jake McCabe, Conor Timmins and Simon Benoit. Liljegren is a restricted free agent, so his contract should be manageable. If Treliving wants to spend 20 per cent of his cap space on defence, he could budget another $11 million to land a higher-end defenceman. If he could commit 25 per cent of the cap to the blue line, it would give him $16 million to spend on free-agent defencemen. Or he could hope some of the young defensive prospects who tend to be cheap can make an impact, like Cade Webber or Topi Niemela.
That would help with his other problem around the corner, possible extensions for Marner and Tavares.
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