'The Salary Cap Was Flat': Former Maple Leafs GM Kyle Dubas Unfazed By How Core Four Contracts Were Negotiated

Former Toronto Maple Leafs GM Kyle Dubas has no regrets about how he negotiated the contracts of the core four of Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, and John Tavares.

The now-Pittsburgh Penguins president and general manager joined Cam Janssen and Andy Strickland of The Cam & Strick Podcast this week and dove into what it was like with Toronto during the contract negotiations of Matthews, Marner, and Nylander.

“The thing that handcuffed it was the salary cap was flat,” Dubas told Janssen and Strickland.

The Maple Leafs had just signed John Tavares to a seven-year, $77 million contract in the summer of 2018, and had each of their restricted free agents with one or two years left on their entry-level contracts. 

The first RFA up for renewal was Nylander, and that was a difficult negotiation. Nylander and Toronto didn’t agree on a deal until the final day on which the player could sign (December 1), before he would be deemed ineligible to play that season.

Nylander inked a six-year, $45.09 million contract with an annual average value of $7.51 million. A few months later, in February 2019, Dubas extended Matthews to a five-year, $58.2 million deal, which carried an $11.64 million AAV, the highest cap hit in the NHL at the time.

Then came the Marner negotiation, which didn’t last as long as Nylander’s but was quite messy. After several months of talks, with some rumors coming out to the public, Toronto got Marner signed to a six-year, $65.41 million contract, carrying an AAV of $10.9 million.

The Maple Leafs entered the 2019-20 season with $41.05 million locked up between Matthews, Marner, Nylander, and Tavares, which at the time, was almost 50 percent of their cap space.

“We basically used a template of what a lot of what the other teams had done that had the fortune of having a lot of high picks on the team, and then we added John in free agency in 2018,” Dubas said, “and then during that first year of all of the extensions, there was obviously COVID and in order to keep the league rolling, the league and PA worked together, the cap was flat throughout the rest, so that’s life.”

Nobody could’ve predicted the world shutting down, Dubas added. Though he also admitted that, in some cases, the Maple Leafs didn’t adapt well after coming out of the pandemic.

“We took a lot of shots in 2020, 2021, that weren’t as successful and then adapted that, but obviously didn’t get to the point that any of us wanted,” he said. 

“It was on us to make the right decisions around that group of players, and I think everyone wishes the team would’ve performed better as a group and individually in the playoffs, and I don’t point to any one situation or one thing, but we didn’t get it done, and that’s as simple as I can put it, probably.”

Dubas and the Maple Leafs defeated the Tampa Bay Lightning in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs in 2023, before being ousted by the Florida Panthers in five games during the second round.

Shortly after Dubas’ season-ending press conference that year, where he was honest and said it’s unfair to answer if he’ll return to Toronto (his contract was up), given the stress it put on his family, then-Toronto president of hockey operations, Brendan Shanahan, relieved Dubas of his duties.

One month later, Dubas signed on as the president of hockey operations with the Penguins, and he’s still there today. Since joining the Penguins, Dubas has brought several staff from the Maple Leafs to Pittsburgh, including Jason Spezza (assistant GM of the Penguins), Wes Clark (vice president of player personnel), Rich Clune (assistant coach), and Troy Paquette (assistant video coach).