Landing the draft pick that will likely net them Auston Matthews won’t keep the Toronto Maple Leafs from hotly pursuing Steven Stamkos in free agency.
But the salary cap considerations might.
The Leafs enter this off-season with plenty of holes to fill and approximately $11.5 million to spend – an equation that gets awfully tricky if you factor in a potential annual salary of $10-million or more for Stamkos.
So even if the Leafs can convince the star centre to sign in Toronto on July 1 – a pie-in-the-sky hypothetical at this point – there will be plenty of issues to navigate. Among them are obvious needs in goal and on the blue line, which helps explain why president Brendan Shanahan tapped the brakes slightly amid the excitement of Saturday’s draft lottery win.
“We still know and recognize that this is the end of Year 1 (of the rebuild),” Shanahan told reporters in Toronto. “There’s a long way to go.”
Winning the right to draft Matthews doesn’t materially change anything about the organization’s approach to this summer. The Leafs were guaranteed one of the top four picks after finishing 30th overall this season and were counting on adding a high quality entry-level player as a result.
As it turns out, they’ll get the best one.
The Leafs had already done well to get Morgan Rielly ($5-million AAV) and Nazem Kadri ($4.5-million AAV) signed to reasonable six-year contracts right after the season ended. That immediately cleared up the most pressing decisions they faced on restricted free agents.
Beyond the possible pursuit of Stamkos, the biggest question now hanging over this off-season is what they’ll do in goal. Jonathan Bernier has one year remaining on his deal at $4.15 million, but he’s coming off two up-and-down seasons.
To get more competitive they’ll likely have to use up valuable cap space on that position, not to mention possibly first giving up assets to land a player like Frederik Andersen in a trade with Anaheim. The best free-agent options in net are not slam-dunk solutions with James Reimer and Cam Ward both expected to be available.
In fact, it’s difficult to see the Leafs being a major spender on the open market – especially with their cap situation potentially precarious. You sign a unique talent like Stamkos if you can, sure, and navigate the cascading circumstances later; but otherwise they’ll need to be prudent.
“We’ll know as we get closer to free agency who is available and who fits into our plans and our vision for us to get better,” said Shanahan.
They are planning on having some players make the leap from the American Hockey League – forwards William Nylander, Zach Hyman and Nikita Soshnikov were among those that impressed during cameo appearances late in the year – while Russian defenceman Nikita Zaitsev is still expected to sign with the Leafs after seeing his KHL contract run out with CSKA Moscow over the weekend.
There is an incredible number of moving pieces in play, including last year’s first-round pick Mitch Marner who is lighting it up in the Ontario Hockey League playoffs, but added together they point to potential cap limitations.
Even though the Leafs have tons of flexibility to operate in long-term injured reserve, that option becomes less appealing in 2016-17 when they could ice a lineup that includes Nylander, Marner and possibly Matthews (or Patrik Laine).
Those players would all be on entry-level contracts and therefore eligible to hit performance bonuses that might result in significant overage penalties down the road. It’s something a team as cap savvy as the Leafs will be well aware of.
Shanahan described the impending No. 1 pick as a “great piece” of the team’s rebuilding efforts, but the front office still needs to manage a complicated puzzle.
“This is a team game, we play a team style,” he said. “The more players you can get of a high calibre, obviously that’s a good thing. But we also recognize that at this stage whoever is coming in here is going to be a young person, a rookie, and not going to have the weight of the world thrust on their shoulders.”
The most important takeaway about the organization is that it’s in a great position. It has certainly grown by leaps and bounds in the last year.
But even after seeing head coach Mike Babcock make significant strides last season – and even if they manage to sign Stamkos this summer after drafting Matthews – plenty of hurdles remain.
“The building blocks that Mike did put in this year, if you ignore the fact that we finished 30th, I think that we really felt at the very least the ship was turned in the right direction,” Shanahan observed. “Now it’s time to start advancing it.”
A tricky job gets even trickier from here.
