New NHL Contracts Spark Fresh Debate About Maple Leafs’ Core

Did the Toronto Maple Leafs get screwed when it came to their big contracts, the Core 4, and a pandemic that severely impacted all their plans? TSN 1050’s Matthew Cauz seems to think so, arguing that COVID “killed the Maple Leafs more than almost any other team…”

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Every offseason, the Maple Leafs’ core-four era gets relitigated. This offseason, it’s coming up again thanks to a series of high-profile, big-money contract extensions for some very young stars. The argument that the Maple Leafs “overpaid their stars” has been a popular take for years, but there’s often not been another club that took the same strategy the Maple Leafs did, signing Mitch Marner, Auston Matthews, William Nylander, and John Tavares when they believed the cap would continue to climb.

It turned out to be a terrible decision, but no one saw a pandemic coming, nor the flat salary cap that followed.

Matthews, Marner, and Nylander all signed their major extensions before the pandemic froze the NHL’s salary cap for four straight seasons. At the time, those numbers were aggressive but defensible bets on a cap that was expected to keep climbing the way it always had. Instead, COVID hit, revenue cratered, and the ceiling stayed parked at $81.5 million from 2019 all the way through 2022. Deals that were supposed to become cheaper relative to the cap over time instead sat there, eating a bigger share of the pie than anyone projected when the ink dried.

Add John Tavares’ $11 million cap hit into that mix, and Toronto had essentially no breathing room.

Retaining Zach Hyman became impossible, Patrick Marleau‘s contract had to be moved just to shed money, and the kind of complementary talent that could have surrounded the core was never realistically in play.

None of this is new information, exactly. And it’s not like the Maple Leafs were the only team impacted by the changing cap. Toronto wasn’t unique in having expensive talent during the freeze. However, the Leafs aggressively signed all three of their stars at amounts relative to their production comps at the time, with little room built in for anything to go wrong.

Could This Situation Repeat Itself?

That’s what makes this summer’s contract boom worth watching through a different lens. Leo Carlsson, Macklin Celebrini, and Connor Bedard have all signed five-year deals at numbers that only make sense if the cap keeps climbing at its current pace. In Anaheim, they need to get Cutter Gauthier signed. That will mean two young talents will be taking up a huge chunk of the cap with the hope they grow into their deals and the cap keeps going up. In San Jose, Celebrini will become the highest-paid player in the NHL. Will Smith will need a new deal too. Is San Jose in a good position if the two players take up about 25% of their team’s total cap?

These teams will be making the same bet Toronto’s front office effectively made in 2019 — just with better information about where the cap is projected to go. If the growth holds, those teams look smart. If it stalls the way it did in 2020, some of them could be staring down a very familiar problem a few years from now.

Whether COVID was the actual cause of Toronto’s cap crunch or simply the most convenient excuse for questionable term and dollar decisions is still up for debate. But the current wave of big, cap-bet contracts makes one thing clear: the Leafs’ situation wasn’t just bad luck. It was a preview.

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