The Maple Leafs put John Tavares ahead of team-building two years ago, and they’ve been paying ever since
Tavares #Tavares
Still spinning their organizational wheels more than six years into the Shanaplan, the Maple Leafs were in desperate need of change during this strangest of off-seasons. And so far, they have engineered plenty.
Their defence corps looks better than it has in a while with the free-agent additions of T.J. Brodie and Zach Bogosian, even if it still lacks a Norris Trophy-worthy stud. And it’ll be hard to not pull for Scarborough’s Wayne Simmonds, healthy again and supplying a long-sought dose of functional toughness. In other words, there are at least a few reasons to be optimistic that Toronto’s NHL team has put itself in a position to win its first playoff series in what’ll be 17 years next spring.
Then again, conjuring off-season exuberance has become a Toronto specialty. Actual success, even a modest smidgen, was surely supposed to have arrived by now. And let’s face it, if this ongoing rejig doesn’t do the trick — if improving the defensive depth and adding veteran grit doesn’t get the Leafs into the playoffs and beyond the first round — we all know where the franchise is headed. Instead of shuffling bodies on the roster’s relative periphery, management will be obliged to re-examine the merits of its core four.
There’s a school of thought, after all, that all the roster shuffling and cap jockeying in the world cannot possibly compensate for the franchise’s original team-building sin. That original sin was widely seen as the return of a prodigal son. The 2018 summertime signing of John Tavares brought the Leafs a team captain, a point-a-game scorer and more even-strength goals over the past two seasons than anybody not named Alex Ovechkin, Patrick Kane, Auston Matthews and Leon Draisaitl. But while the Tavares deal was a moment out of a storybook — complete with the timeless image of a tiny Tavares tucking into his Maple Leafs sheets and dreaming of a starring role for his hometown team — it continues to put undeniable stress on their salary-cap-limited pocketbook, and not only because Tavares’s no-movement clause means he’s essentially in command of his guaranteed-salary whereabouts until 2025.
“(Tavares) was an unnecessary signing,” Craig Button, the former NHL general manager, said during a segment on TSN’s Free Agent Frenzy coverage on Friday. “It was not what the Toronto Maple Leafs needed … They’re built up the centre. They’re not built up anywhere else.”
Paying Tavares $77 million (U.S.) over seven years set the baseline for negotiations that led to Toronto’s top four players earning about half of the now-flat salary cap of $81.5 million. It led to Matthews rightly demanding to be the highest-paid player on the team at $11.6. It led to Marner demanding only slightly less at $10.9. And even if William Nylander’s $6.9 million cap hit doesn’t seem so egregious with Nylander coming off a 31-goal season, the team’s kid-gloved negotiations on that deal — which came after Tavares but before Matthews and Marner — spoke to an inability to convince players to take the hometown discounts team president Brendan Shanahan had once spoken hopefully about securing.
None of this, it ought to be pointed out, is a knock on Tavares, the player. It’s a question of Tavares, the fit. Yes, jersey-burning New York Islanders fans will point out that the Islanders have won more playoff series in the two seasons since Tavares departed (three plus a play-in round) than they won in Tavares’s nine seasons as the franchise’s cornerstone (one). And jittery Leaf fans will note that Tavares, coming off an underwhelming 26-goal season, turned 30 last month and, unless he’s subscribing to the LeBron James Cocktail of the Month Club, likely isn’t getting better from here. But this isn’t a question of the excellence of a highly-paid player so much as the requisite sacrifice of team depth that comes with acquiring him.
“It’s not about John Tavares,” Button said. “It’s about how you build your team. The bottom line is (the Tavares deal) was a signing that has hurt and hindered and handcuffed the Toronto Maple Leafs because of the salary cap.”
Indeed, every dollar counts. Even if the Leafs had landed Tavares at the number they’d originally offered — something closer to $10 million — they’d be in far better shape today. It wouldn’t have just saved them about $1 million on Tavares’s cap hit. It would have, ideally, pushed down the cap hits of Matthews and Marner. And those savings would have meant something. Heck, last off-season the Maple Leafs made what’s now seen as the mistake to swap Nazem Kadri for Alex Kerfoot in part to save a measly $1 million or so annually at the third-line centre position.
An extra few million a season might have saved the Leafs from scrimping on backup goaltending, which has put them in trouble ever since Curtis McElhinney left the building. It might have allowed them to retain one or both of Kasperi Kapanen and Andreas Johnsson instead of throwing them over the side for cap purposes this off-season and putting a considerable dent in next season’s potential for depth scoring. There’s no telling the difference it might have made.
“I remember sitting there and not liking the (Tavares) deal,” Pierre McGuire, the NBC analyst, said during that TSN segment on Friday. “Not because I didn’t like John Tavares as a player and not because I didn’t think he would help Toronto but (because) they overlooked a lot of their organizational needs. Being harder to play against. Depth on defence. Elite stopping ability on defence. Were they good enough in goal? So there were a lot of things missing.”
Acquiring Tavares, McGuire continued, was a sign that Toronto wasn’t paying attention to what he called “the art of team building.” Speaking of that art, McGuire pointed to the way the Tampa Bay Lightning, in the lead-up to winning the bubble Stanley Cup, shored up their core talent with the role-playing likes of Barclay Goodrow and Blake Coleman and Kevin Shattenkirk and Luke Schenn and Bogosian. An optimistic Leafs fan might look at the signings of Brodie and Simmonds and Bogosian and see team management taking a page from the Lightning playbook — Lightning Light, if you will, given the cap crunch.
Whether or not Lightning Light will finally steer the Leafs out of the dark is a question that won’t be confronted for months. But if the answer isn’t a resounding yes, the next roster remake will involve a serious reconsideration of the fundamental viability of Toronto’s core four.
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