Happy Thanksgiving to our American friends.
And Happy … weird Sweden bye sort of week to any Toronto Maple Leafs fans twiddling their thumbs waiting for their next game on Friday.
Obviously, there’s been a ton of attention on William Nylander of late, and as a result, we might be reaching a saturation point with how much we can talk about his play and, yes, his contract situation.
But a lot of the conversation around him feels a bit alarmist to me, with people throwing out increasingly bigger numbers with every big game he puts up. What I wanted to do here is really stick to the facts, with two goals in mind:
1. Find the right comparables for a new contract, taking into consideration his red-hot start to the season, the salary cap going up and other mitigating factors.
2. Find a way to fit that resulting contract into the Leafs always-crowded cap sheet for 2024-25 and beyond.
Make sense? Good.
The right comparable for Nylander
In the recent past when I’ve run comparables analysis for Nylander and his next contract, one name has come up at the top of the list every time: Nashville Predators star Filip Forsberg.
In July 2022, Forsberg signed an eight-year deal for $68 million, good for a cap hit of $8.5 million that is tied for the 43rd biggest contract in the NHL.
At the time he signed, Forsberg was 27 years old and had played 566 games, scored 220 times and put up 469 points.
Entering this season, Nylander was 27 years old and had played 521 games, scored 177 times and put up 430 points.
So, take the Forsberg contract and expand it by the amount the cap is set to rise next season, and the right offer for Nylander is around $9.1 million a season. Right?
What that misses is how dramatically Nylander is trending up — and past Forsberg, who has played fewer games and produced at a slower rate than his countryman in recent seasons. It also misses the fact that, among comparables, Forsberg is underpaid.
If we prorate Nylander’s current torrid pace to put him somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100 points by the end of the season, he will have produced more than a point per game over the last five seasons overall.
That alone puts him among the top 25 offensive players in the league while potentially hitting UFA status on July 1. And, by next spring, that ranking appears it will be upgraded to top 15.
Scorers in that echelon don’t make $8.5 million a season. The top 11 forwards in the NHL currently earn $10 million or more. The next eight are at $9.5 million or more.
That’s Nylander’s company at this point. Against the 2024-25 cap, which is projected to hit $87.6 million, that’s going to be a contract with eight digits AAV.
If you add in Nylander potentially putting up a 50-goal, 100-point season this year, the comparables shift away from Forsberg some.
Other names that now show up as closer matches? David Pastrnak and his $11.25 million cap hit. Or Jonathan Huberdeau ($10.5 million), Johnny Gaudreau ($9.75 million), Patrick Kane ($10.5 million back in 2014) and Matthew Tkachuk ($9.5 million).
Including Forsberg’s relative bargain contract, that group comprises the right six comparables for Nylander at this point in time. The average of the percentage of the cap that they received on their contracts, meanwhile, is a meaty 12.5 percent.
Which is the equivalent of just shy of $11 million for next season.
Now, you can argue, correctly, that Pastrnak and Kane are in a different tier and shouldn’t serve as direct comparables that make sense. But it’s much harder to make that case with the other four.
Huberdeau and Gaudreau, in particular, have been outscored by Nylander in recent years, a gap that appears will widen by the end of this campaign.
The right number, then, is going to start with a 10.
What can the Leafs afford to pay?
That’s more than I think most would have forecast a year ago. But Nylander’s a different player than the one who entered the 2022-23 season.
More determined. More of a consistent factor. More dominant in the postseason, despite a continued lack of team success. Picking up more minutes and really carrying a line, night after night.
But can the Leafs make a number that big work, given they’re already paying Auston Matthews, John Tavares and Mitch Marner a combined $35.15 million next year? Would someone have to go to make the math fit?
Not necessarily.
Working in the Leafs’ favour is they have a ton of money coming off the books at the end of this season. With the cap set to increase by more than $4 million, Toronto will also gain back more than $21 million in cap space — nearly a quarter of their entire salary room — with expiring contracts for John Klingberg, Tyler Bertuzzi, Ilya Samsonov, Max Domi and T.J. Brodie.
Other than Nylander, no one else is really due a significant raise. Matthews’ third-contract bump will eat up $1.6 million beginning next year, but it’s hard to see big paydays for RFAs like Timothy Liljegren or Nick Robertson at this point.
So in paying Nylander another $3 million or so beyond where he was at, the Leafs are effectively using the $4.17 million cap increase to offset most of the larger share for the Core Four, assuming all of them end up returning.
Here is what the Leafs cap spend looks like for 2024-25 with Nylander at a big number and a few of the RFAs signed for reasonable bridge deals:
That lineup obviously has some key holes, but the Leafs would still have $19.7 million to spend to fill them.
Perhaps they can go cheap in goal, taking a flier on whoever the next Samsonov could be while allowing Woll to continue to play regularly? Perhaps they can convince Brodie to come back at a sharp haircut?
And maybe next year’s versions of Bertuzzi and Domi come in for less than $8.5 million? Moving on from Klingberg and demoting Reaves, meanwhile, easily opens up another $5.3 million of misallocated space.
Nylander has likely driven his asking price up early on this season with a great start, but an additional $1 million there isn’t going to radically alter the Leafs financial picture. And things should only improve once Tavares’ $11 million deal expires in the summer of 2025, especially if he’s willing to return on a hometown discount in the Jason Spezza/Mark Giordano mould.
The Leafs finally seem to have a handful of lower-cost players who will be able to give them regular minutes, too, which puts far less pressure on the cap and on finding hidden gems in the bargain bin.
Paying Nylander isn’t going to be ruinous to their near-term plans. Maybe the contract ages poorly as it stretches into his mid-30s, but it’s hard to see it being problematic during the next few seasons where Matthews is locked in.
Even if Tavares diminishes with age and/or Marner moves on as a free agent in 2025, Matthews and Nylander at a combined cap hit of around $24 million should be a good enough one-two punch to enable them to consistently contend — especially if the cap creeps up into the high 90s in short order.
So I wouldn’t put much stock in anyone calling for Nylander to get more than $12 million, or the idea that the more he scores, the less likely it is he can come back. The most likely outcome here is his prolific start motivates the Leafs to get closer to the number he wanted in the offseason, pushing the two sides into a compromise solution that may have been harder to reach had he struggled out of the gate.
The Leafs will have some concerning things to address on their roster, both now and next summer, but fitting in Nylander shouldn’t be an insurmountable problem.
For that, they can simply listen to Teddy KGB.
(Photo: Nick Turchiaro / USA Today)