Zee said:
Nik the Trik said:
disco said:
During the 2nd intermission roundtable Friedman had a good presentation of various recent cup-winners and their top-4 cap players with the % of the cap they took up. Most of them took up 40-45% of their teams cap. (Washington - Ovechkin/Backstrom/Kuznetzov/Carlson, Pittsburgh - Crosby/Malkin/Letang/Kessel, Chicago - Toews/Kane/Keith/Seabrook, etc.)
https://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/headlines-bad-news-florida-nylander-holding-firm/
The Leafs to be around that would be something like:
Matthews $12-million
Tavares $11-million
Marner $8.5-million
Nylander $7-million
(around 44%)
There's a lot misleading about that sort of comparison but to start with, just factually, Carlson was emphatically not one of the Caps 4 highest salaried players when they won the cup.
Matthews and Marner also won't be two of the higher salaried Leafs when we win the Cup this season.
Well, that's the other thing. I have no idea what year that's supposed to represent. That has the 4 salaries coming in at a combined 38.5 million but 38.5 million isn't 44% of this year's cap and it would only be 44% of next year's cap if there's almost a 7 million jump in the cap limit for next year.
But that sort of underscores the absurdity of the comparison in the first place(to say nothing of comparing what the Leafs have to do in signing their players to what teams could do with no term limit, back diving deals). If the cap is 86 million or so as suggested next year then 38.5 million is just under 45% of the cap but 42 million, which could break down as Nylander at 8, Marner at 10 and Matthews at 13, is only about four percentage points higher.
It makes sense that the Leafs would rather sign them all for 38.5 as opposed to 42 but the idea that 38.5 has the team capable of contending but 42 is some sort of unworkable quagmire that there's literally no room for doesn't add up at all, especially not when we're already projecting pretty robust cap growth into the calculations. 42 million combined would be at 44% of the cap soon enough.