One of the things the offseason lends itself to is deep dives into team building and over at The Athletic, Dom Luszczyszyn has completed league-wide analysis on contract efficiency around the NHL and graded the teams. I won’t spoil the entire article, but the Panthers are the top team with an A+ grade and that’s going to feed the narrative/reality that players will take a shave on their contract to play for a contending team in the sun. As for the Leafs, they were given a B-grade and we’ll dive into the why of that right now.
The clear highlights for the Leafs in their contract situation are Auston Matthews and Joseph Woll. Matthews having value to add at this point of his career regardless of his price tag, and Joseph Woll being half a tandem at a cap hit below the league minimum salary is a coup. That said, I’m not sure I see where Matthews should be valued as a $18.4M player or Woll as a $6.9M player, but without seeing how the sausage is made and the fact that his valuation model is applied across the league, it’s fair to draw the conclusion these are good deals.
On the flip side of things is the William Nylander contract. Dom addresses it in the article by saying, “Nylander has the ability to look like an $11.5 million player or better, it’s a matter of whether he can consistently be that year in and year out — and the model raises skepticism considering he doesn’t have a lengthy resume in that range.” It’s hard to argue against that. Nylander is exiting the peak performance years associated with NHLers and while not everyone will drop off at the same rate, there will be more years in decline for Nylander than improvement or even stability. The Leafs paid the top possible dollar amount, and it would be hard to see him getting $11.5M on the open market. It is a bizarre deal for a good player, not unlike Marner’s current contract. And like Marner’s current contract it will rely on the salary cap increasing to be palatable.
Beyond Nylander, the issues are pretty minor. Kampf’s C-minus contract is a steep overpayment for a fourth line player and in a tight cap world, getting that contract wrong hurts even if it doesn’t have the long term sting of Nylander’s deal. Toronto’s issue has always been more about avoiding the death from one thousand cuts on poorly executed smaller deals than egregious mega deals, but the final year of John Tavares’ deal does carry the largest deficit on the Leafs in Dom’s model. The fact that it is entirely canceled out by Bobby McMann’s ability to outperform his contract might not comfort some as we are all guilty at looking at contracts in isolation too often.
It is important to note that not everyone will see eye to eye on this. I’m assuming that the model is based on game score value, and as is often the case with NHL analytics, it favours sheltered defencemen heavily as the value on both Liljegren and Timmins are higher than you’d expect to see. Similarly, the goaltenders and small sample size forwards like Bobby McMann have much to live up to. Both Leafs goaltenders have strong numbers and hence strong value, but if they won’t give the Leafs close to 82 games, how does that impact Toronto’s contract efficiency?
There may also be some recency bias at play as the more recent the contract the less efficient it seems to be. This isn’t a Dubas being good at contracts and Treliving being bad at contracts thing, I don’t think either one has a track record you can universally paint with one brush, but instead, there is something to be said about how much a $5M jump in the salary cap smooths out the some of the longer standing issues. If the salary cap jumps another $5M, the Tanev and Ekman-Larsson deals might not be touted as steals but would at least be forgotten in the frequent salary cap discourse.
The main thing from an article like Dom’s is what can be learned from it and with the John Tavares and Mitch Marner contracts looming, there is potentially a lot that can be gleaned even before you start comparing to what the more successfully graded teams do. Dom’s model provides yet another potential value to associate with the next contracts for Tavares and Marner, and while I believe the Tavares number should in fact be much lower, there is an opportunity to find surplus value for players like Tavares and at least take on less of a deficit with someone like Marner.
There will also be erosion in value for a player like Jake McCabe, and with Matthew Knies coming off of his entry level contract, there will need to be an effort to find value elsewhere, most likely via Fraser Minten and Easton Cowan.
The Leafs won’t enter this season hindered horribly by their contracts, but it doesn’t mean this is an optimal roster either. An effort needs to be made to still align the right roster, to the salary cap, all while applying the talents of the roster in a meaningful way. It’s nice to see Toronto is in good shape on cost effectiveness but work still needs to be done.
