Do you realize teams need 3 good lines to win a cup? The third line is extremely important

how could they discount it for later years?

i agree, he gets moved at the draft.

PLAY DERMOTT!

Also Nylanders contract is equal to what 7.5milx6 contract would look like. Dubas is genius to be able to have Willy under 7mil for time in necessity. Willy is 1st liner. In year from now everybody would love that "bargain" deal.

The f***ing state of leafs fans these days. Willy on under 7, how are you not jumping out of joy?

I hope @ChowYunFat took out life insurance before this post.

Get ready for some hate mail from Leafs Nation...

I am jumping for Joy. Also to reply to the original post Nylander will be on a line with Matthews and I'm guessing Marleau. He'll be on the top power play line. He'll get as many minutes as Matthews, Marner & Tavares. This signing makes the team insane from on offense standpoint.

Can someone explain to me how we're seeing this contract with varying AAV's during the life of the contract? Why isn't the math $45M/6 years = $7.5M? It seems like a circumvention. Brilliant by Dubas, for sure.

This is a dumb take that has Oilers fan written all over it.

See, but a "3rd liner" isn't even accurate. He'll be on Auston Matthews line as soon as he's up to speed. You can't just throw a guy to the dogs who hasn't played a lick in the NHL this year when everybody else has had 3 months to get back to their form. Nylander is one of the best young players in the NHL right now. Toronto is absolutely stacked so you saying he "isn't even one of the top 5" is bogus, on a team like Toronto he isn't but put him on Arizona and he'd give Keller a run for his money. Put him on the Devils and he'd give Hischier and Hall a run for their money. Put him on the Wild and he'd give Granlund a run for his money. The fact Toronto is able to get Nylander at $6.9M cap hit after this season is a huge win for the Leafs, Nylander is easily a 70-90p player next to Matthews, if not even better. $6.9M is a complete bargain for that type of production. Everybody compared him to Pasta and say how he isn't as good as him which I agree with, but Pasta is signed to an extremely team-friendly deal. Pasta is more like an $8M player.

I really cannot explain it to you, Im not that capable, there are some people here that have their nose miles in this stuff. I know what I need to know. Basically I know that this is real thing but cannot explain it well enough.

The money is during a shorter period this year basically, so it's more money / game, but they can't have a higher hit this year without decreasing the hit the following years. Maybe this isn't the causal reason, but that's how I make sense of it in my head

I'll try:

The confusing part comes from salary versus cap hit. Cap hit is the total amount of the salary paid to the player averaged out over the span of their contract. This gives you the AAV we see for every player on this site. The weird thing is that players aren't usually paid the cap hit. Most players get a different salary (the dollars paid to them) every year. For example, Parise and Suter on the Wild are being paid $9M this year in salary, but their cap is around $7.5M. This is because their deal is front-loaded which means they are paid over the cap hit for the first few years but under their cap hit for the last few years of their deal.

For RFA's if they sign in-season their cap hit is calculated differently based on salary. The following is not true for anybody except RFA's (so UFA's do not get the same treatment). To calculate cap hit for years 2-6 for Nylander you take the salary he earns this year ($12M) and multiply it by the days in the current NHL season remaining, divide that number by total NHL days in a season (186) and then add that number to the total amount of salary still owed to the player (so $33M), then divide that by the total years of the contract (so 6 years for Nylander). This gives you that weird $6.96M number. To calculate the cap hit for the first year (this year), you take that $6.96 cap hit number and multiply it by total season days (186) and divide it by season days remaining. That gives you the $10M number.

It's really confusing but basically the ratio of season days remaining and total season days (and vice versa) along with the salary give you the weird numbers.

Fantastic explanation, thank you.

It seems like waiting until the last minute actually helped Nylander effectively get his $7.5M annual value, while getting the AAV for the contract down below $7M for the major years of the contract. Hard to think that Dubas would've wanted to sign anything much earlier if that's how the math works.

LOVING THE EXPLANATION AROUSEDCAT! Thank you!

Awesome, I'm glad it made sense since it is a very confusing thing (even for someone who loves math like me).

It absolutely did, and it has been theorized by a few media members and some on this site that this was Dubas plan all along. I tend to not agree with that notion since I don't think Nylander wanted to sit out this long and I don't think Dubas wanted him to do that either, plus the relationship was definitely partially soured through this whole thing. Basically I don't think anybody wanted this to happen, but it definitely helped out Toronto's cap situation down the road (and the funny thing is that this was implemented in the CBA to deter teams from waiting to the deadline since most teams are already pretty close to the cap and doing so makes them carry such a large cap hit the 1st year). I could see a situation where Dubas realized this thing wasn't going to be done for a while a ways into the season and maybe he intentionally waited to the deadline to give Nylander his best offer to get the cap higher this year, but again I don't think that was his plan all along.



You're very welcome, I'm glad it was coherent and helpful!

Nylander will be playing with Mathews