Mirtle: What were hearing about the Maple Leafs salary cap and summer moves

All right, time for an August post. Hope everyone’s summer is going well.

I have a couple tidbits to get into with the Maple Leafs’ recent moves in goal, and then we’ll deep dive into what’s happening with their salary-cap situation. I’ve seen some inaccurate talk about where Toronto sits against the upper limit and with their roster, which now has every restricted free agent signed after Nick Abruzzese agreed to a two-year deal for a league minimum cap hit on Monday.

So we’ll do our best to clear that up.

But first, let’s talk Matt Murray.

How did Matt Murray end up on LTIR?

So last week the Leafs announced that Murray would be out indefinitely and begin the season on long-term injured reserve.

What stood out to me that day was that the language used by the team and Elliotte Friedman of “Hockey Night in Canada” was slightly different.

Of note …

The Maple Leafs announced today that goaltender Matt Murray is out indefinitely and will be placed on Injured Reserve/Long Term Injury prior to the start of the season.

— Leafs PR (@LeafsPR) July 26, 2023

And then …

As expected, TOR announces Matt Murray will be going on LTIR for the 2023-24 season.

— Elliotte Friedman (@FriedgeHNIC) July 26, 2023

Maybe it’s semantics, and maybe the Leafs can’t say in July that a player is definitely out for the season, but the fact Friedman, who is more plugged in than anyone, is calling this a season-long ailment is meaningful.

Basically, Murray is now in a Jake Muzzin situation, where the remainder of his career is in doubt.

As far as I could tell talking to other teams, the Leafs didn’t make an aggressive push to try and trade the Murray contract. Giving up a sweetener, as with Petr Mrazek last summer, isn’t ideal, obviously. Not when other avenues are on the table.

So the two options for them were going to either be a buyout using the second window after Ilya Samsonov’s arbitration case was settled — something new GM Brad Treliving explicitly referenced at the draft — or Murray missing the full season due to injuries.

Murray’s agent, Octagon’s Robert Hooper, hasn’t responded to request for comment, so getting detailed perspective from the player’s side is a bit of a dead end here.

I did, however, talk to the league about whether they signed off on Murray going onto LTIR. The NHL doesn’t need to explicitly approve LTIR in the offseason, but the Leafs do have to submit proper medical documentation to justify the move.

“We do have the right to verify to the extent we deem it necessary and/or appropriate,” a league source said of the possibility of the NHL looking more closely at the Murray situation at some point.

That said, we’ve seen many players with less injury history than Murray end up on LTIR for a season or more. Murray’s list of ailments is extremely extensive the past two years, with as many as 10 different injuries, including head, neck, ankle and groin issues.

One of the other key factors in the Murray situation is the way his contract is structured. When he signed with the Senators in October of 2020, it was a four-year, $25 million contract.

The unusual wrinkle was that it was heavily backloaded, with 32 percent of the salary in the final year of the deal.

That’s significant for two reasons:

1. It’s unlikely that, had he remained in Ottawa, the Senators would want that big of a cash figure on LTIR all season. While there have been some complaints from Ottawa fans about not getting LTIR relief from the $1.56 million they retained on Murray’s deal when he was traded to Toronto in the summer of 2022, they avoided a much bigger headache by getting rid of him when they did.

2. Murray stood to lose $2.67 million of the $8 million remaining in salary if he was bought out. It’s highly unlikely he would be able to recoup that as a free agent, not with every team relatively settled in goal and tight against the cap. At best, because of his health, he was likely looking at a near-league minimum contract and a move to a situation where he would potentially be battling for a job in the NHL.

Ending up hurt again, while making less money, and in a market or situation (i.e. the AHL) he didn’t want to be in, was definitely on the table as an outcome.

There’s obviously grey area when it comes to what being “hurt” enough to go on LTIR is. I’ve had executives and agents say that you can take many NHL players who have been in the league for a decade and have a doctor point to something or other with their body that necessitates they sit out.

We don’t know where Murray’s health is at exactly, after he was cleared medically to backup during the playoffs. But his track record meant this was likely always going to be an option for Toronto, assuming the player was amenable to it.

Now, Murray can take a year, keep his full salary, heal and see where he’s at in time for next season and if he wants to attempt to play again. Unlike a lot of NHL players in this situation, Murray is still quite young, as he just turned 29 at the end of May. He’s started only 264 regular-season games in the NHL, too, so the mileage isn’t that heavy.

Murray will have made about $37 million over his career by next summer, nearly a quarter of which the Leafs will pay him to sit this coming season, and can evaluate his options with a cleaner bill of health.

For Toronto, it’s an obvious win, especially because they won’t have $2 million in dead cap space from a buyout in 2024-25. For Murray, it’s a lot of money at stake, and he can potentially better position himself for a comeback story in the fall of 2024.

Although with how little he has played the past two years, the odds are certainly going to be stacked against him.

Matt Murray and Ilya Samsonov. (Kevin Sousa / NHLI via Getty Images)

Will Ilya Samsonov be bitter after arbitration?

As for Samsonov, while I was a little surprised the case reached arbitration, the number they ended up landing on — $3.55 million for one year — was totally reasonable.

The Leafs didn’t need to go through a full arbitration hearing in order to activate the second buyout window, so we can throw that out as a theory for why they went through with it. But I suspect they wanted to get his number a little lower than $3.55 million to give them some more cap wiggle room, as you’ll see in my calculations further down in this post.

The one downside to having an arbitration hearing in order to try and squeeze a key player, like your starting goalie, is the cases can create bad blood between player and team.

I’ve certainly covered enough cases like that throughout the years (i.e. here and here). I particularly remember long-time NHL exec Rick Dudley, who’s now a senior advisor with the Panthers, once telling me about one case with a significant player in Ottawa back in 1998 that was particularly harsh.

“Shawn McEachern, who is a very good guy, he was visibly shaken by the whole process,” Dudley said in an interview in 2010. “But that’s the way you do things. You have to because the other side’s going to say Shawn McEachern’s the reincarnation of Guy Lafleur.

“You almost have to balance it out. It’s a very, very difficult process to me. It’s not a nice thing.”

The good news? Not every arbitration hearing is like that. And it seems, in general, they are a bit tamer than some of the all-out wars in the past.

I talked to some folks who were involved in the Samsonov process, and they spoke highly of how Treliving handled the situation as a new GM coming in who doesn’t have a relationship with the player.

There was “nothing out of bounds,” said a source with knowledge of how the arbitration hearing went. “And Brad is very professional.”

Both sides, to my understanding, were fine with the ultimate award.

What prevented the Leafs from getting a longer-term deal done? Well, every year beyond the first one was going to be a UFA season for Samsonov. And given he’s coming off a big year, and will be the Leafs No. 1 to start 2023-24, those UFA years could get expensive.

The Leafs were likely looking at a $4.25 million cap hit on a two-year deal, $4.5 million on a three-year deal, and numbers that went up from there the longer the contract was.

All this for a goaltender who has started just 119 regular-season games.

As a result, short term makes a lot of sense. But if Samsonov has another season like last year, his cap hit is going to start with a five the next time around.

Ryan Reaves sits on Auston Matthews. (David Berding / Getty Images)

How do the Leafs get cap compliant before the season?

Yes, the $83.5 million question.

If you look at CapFriendly right now, the Leafs have the worst cap situation in the NHL, with negative $12.4 million in available room.

Putting Murray and Muzzin on LTIR gives them $10.3 million of that back, but even accounting for that, the Leafs are the only team considerably over the cap.

So, now what?

Well, I wouldn’t be hitting the panic button. The Leafs have had tighter situations than this before and been fine by the day before the season opens, which is when teams have to get cap compliant.

Let’s start with a plausible roster first and work back from there.

Who knows on the lines at this point, but that’s a 23-man roster that makes some sense. The problem is that it’s $2.07 million over the cap.

But, unlike in the recent past, the Leafs have more players on contracts that are waiver exempt, so they can easily shuffle some bodies in and out. Sending Nick Robertson and Pontus Holmberg down to the Marlies gets Toronto to within $472,000 of being compliant, for example.

(That figure may be why they were wishing they could get Samsonov signed for closer to $3 million, in a perfect world.)

From there, the Leafs would need one more cut to get under the cap. Matthew Knies can go down without waivers, which feels unlikely to happen, given how well he played late last season, but could be a maneuver they use in a short-term situation.

Or, they could place Conor Timmins, Dylan Gambrell and/or Sam Lafferty on waivers and get under the cap that way.

In fact, if they cut or trade Timmins and Lafferty, who make a combined $2.25 million that is fully AHL buriable, they can carry an extra forward or defenseman to start the year, provided that extra makes $1 million or less.

Which could look something like so … with just $15,000 left in breathing room. (I’m sure capologist Brandon Pridham will find a way to get it closer. Last season they entered the year with just $4 in cap space.)

These are all theoretical lineups designed to get the Leafs under the cap. I don’t actually foresee them waiving an established NHL player like Lafferty, given he would have value in a trade.

But the point is the Leafs have a variety of options here, and we’ve seen them enter the season in the past with a league-minimum 18 skaters on the roster. That may be necessary again this fall.

That said, there are almost always injuries in training camp and preseason, which creates more room via LTIR, which in turn means a lot of these decisions get punted into the season. If they ever have to be made at all.

Last year, Timothy Liljegren missed camp and the start of the season after a minor surgery. That meant Toronto was actually going into the year with a $1.4 million cap excess they would have to sort out over the course of the year.

They did, rather painlessly. It didn’t significantly hinder their roster or their ability to swing big deals before the trade deadline.

Expect similar cap gamesmanship this time around. Even if, as I wrote last month, it still feels like there’s another shoe to drop with the construction of this roster.

(Top photo of Brad Treliving: Dan Hamilton / USA Today)

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