Salary Cap allocation, 23/24 Leafs vs the last 3 cup champs (I wanted to go back farther but the data is behind paywalls)
November 5, 2023
Salary Cap allocation, 23/24 Leafs vs the last 3 cup champs (I wanted to go back farther but the data is behind paywalls)
19 comments
and we wonder why our bottom 2 lines and bottom 2 D pairings are bad…
edit: caveats, manual data entry/mathing the groupings. source: capfriendly
Good chart, clearly shows what most have been suggesting. For all his analytic wizardry, it’s strange that he didn’t take time to see this trend. He was too convinced of his idea
We can and we will™
Don’t we already know and have for years we’re the only team that has tried this?
I’m tired of all the core-four whining. The org drafts and develops 3 of the most exciting players in the game, then has prime Tavares fall in their lap. I play that hand every time.
This data is a pretty good example of cherry picking numbers to suit a narrative. Why was top 4 forwards used instead of top 3, or 6 or anything else? Because 4 is the number that looks the worst for the leafs. Top 2 defensemen, then rest of the team? Oddly specific choices. It’s also pretty irrelevant information, tbh. Dollars spent does not equal skill/production on the ice. Our 3rd best dman makes 2 mil on our cap because of retention. Our starting goalie is young and took an arbitration deal.
The only thing to take from this info is that the leafs have chosen to spend more money on top forwards than top dmen, and everyone already knows this.
These charts aren’t really that informative – there isn’t really one true formula for a cup winner. If you just looked at the Avs and Vegas, the message could just as easily be “you can’t tie up money in goaltending” – and the same would apply to St. Louis with Binnington on his cheap deal. There are also probably a lot of teams with similar spending structures to Vegas, Colorado, or Tampa that are awful.
The problem with our team isn’t cap allocation, we actually have plenty of money to spend on players outside of the big 4 forwards (thanks in large part to our discounted goalies and prior lack of bad contracts). We just aren’t getting a single bit of value out of any of the mid-tier money we’ve spent. $5mil on Bertuzzi, $4mil on Klingberg, $3mil on Domi, and you could throw in $2.4mil on Kampf. When combined with useful support pieces like Jarnkrok, Knies, and even Gregor up front and Liljegren, Giordano, and even McCabe on the back end we have plenty of money to field a useful team to surround the stars. The stars are all performing this season, the goaltending has been mostly fine. It’s this squishy middle of contracts that have dropped the ball hard.
It doesn’t matter how you spend your money if what you spend your money on fucking sucks. And right now, too much of our money is spent on players that just aren’t doing enough relative to the cap hit. The stars have been stars, the secondary guys aren’t doing enough.
Does this account for the circumventions or just the standard contracts these teams has before playoffs?
Hey OP, how many shit teams have the model the other three do?
All of them.
This chart is useless. We just aren’t spending the mid tier money on useful players, but we had the space.
The leafs depth is just too weak
Are people still trying to defend this team!?
I get that the distribution of wealth is bad but our top 4 forwards as a whole are better than all 3 of those teams top 4 forwards so it makes sense that they’re paid that way. Unfortunately we didn’t luck into that shiny number 1 D to break up the allocation of the cap. Vegas is a little different because they don’t have a superstar just a bunch really fucking good guys.
The biggest reason why the cap is even an issue is because of a once in a lifetime event that shut the league down and stagnated the cap. I know that no team has ever won with a salary distribution like ours but that’s only the case until it happens. There’s no right way to build a champion.
I’m definitely pissed that the team is the way it is but I don’t think the fact that the core 4 are all forwards is the problem. The problem is that the core 4 guys don’t have that killer instinct
I think this chart shows that the Leafs will win the cup in 23/24.
The Leafs paid their stars expecting the salary cap to surge, it did not.
The last three Cup champs all had their star players contracts come up post-Covid when teams knew the cap was flat or a few years prior to 2020 so they still got a couple years of cap increase.
If you want more accurate measurements, take % of team cap in the year the deals were signed, then convert it to % of team cap based on today’s cap.
You’ll see the discrepancy.
A lot of replies here seem to think this is an attack on the core 4 which it isn’t. Nobody is saying they aren’t good actually they are awesome players but the fact remains it’s very hard if not impossible to win in the nhl without depth players and you will need to pay for that with more than what’s left after the core 4 are paid. If this was the nba the leafs would be a super team but because of the way playoff hockey is played it’s just not realistic to think these 4 guys will carry the leafs to the promised land without help. Of course this wouldn’t be an issue if there was no salary cap but here we are.
They should have traded one of Matthews, Marner or Nylander last summer.
To be fair though, both Tampa and Vegas got to roll like 10 mill extra over the cap and into “rest of team salaries” with good timing on IR players. If the leafs rolled JT onto the IR for the year and spent 11 mill upgrading the team, we’d look different on the chart too
Had the cap increased as expected this would not be a problem.
Toronto’s problem, among other things, is we play for the name on the back not the crest on the front. It’s not exactly a well kept secret that Toronto will pay you well and you don’t have to produce. Sure us fans and the media are nuts and that means that players stop giving a fuck real quick. We need to build a culture where players want to win, not just get the big paycheque.
19 comments
and we wonder why our bottom 2 lines and bottom 2 D pairings are bad…
edit: caveats, manual data entry/mathing the groupings. source: capfriendly
Good chart, clearly shows what most have been suggesting. For all his analytic wizardry, it’s strange that he didn’t take time to see this trend. He was too convinced of his idea
We can and we will™
Don’t we already know and have for years we’re the only team that has tried this?
I’m tired of all the core-four whining. The org drafts and develops 3 of the most exciting players in the game, then has prime Tavares fall in their lap. I play that hand every time.
This data is a pretty good example of cherry picking numbers to suit a narrative. Why was top 4 forwards used instead of top 3, or 6 or anything else? Because 4 is the number that looks the worst for the leafs. Top 2 defensemen, then rest of the team? Oddly specific choices. It’s also pretty irrelevant information, tbh. Dollars spent does not equal skill/production on the ice. Our 3rd best dman makes 2 mil on our cap because of retention. Our starting goalie is young and took an arbitration deal.
The only thing to take from this info is that the leafs have chosen to spend more money on top forwards than top dmen, and everyone already knows this.
These charts aren’t really that informative – there isn’t really one true formula for a cup winner. If you just looked at the Avs and Vegas, the message could just as easily be “you can’t tie up money in goaltending” – and the same would apply to St. Louis with Binnington on his cheap deal. There are also probably a lot of teams with similar spending structures to Vegas, Colorado, or Tampa that are awful.
The problem with our team isn’t cap allocation, we actually have plenty of money to spend on players outside of the big 4 forwards (thanks in large part to our discounted goalies and prior lack of bad contracts). We just aren’t getting a single bit of value out of any of the mid-tier money we’ve spent. $5mil on Bertuzzi, $4mil on Klingberg, $3mil on Domi, and you could throw in $2.4mil on Kampf. When combined with useful support pieces like Jarnkrok, Knies, and even Gregor up front and Liljegren, Giordano, and even McCabe on the back end we have plenty of money to field a useful team to surround the stars. The stars are all performing this season, the goaltending has been mostly fine. It’s this squishy middle of contracts that have dropped the ball hard.
It doesn’t matter how you spend your money if what you spend your money on fucking sucks. And right now, too much of our money is spent on players that just aren’t doing enough relative to the cap hit. The stars have been stars, the secondary guys aren’t doing enough.
Does this account for the circumventions or just the standard contracts these teams has before playoffs?
Hey OP, how many shit teams have the model the other three do?
All of them.
This chart is useless. We just aren’t spending the mid tier money on useful players, but we had the space.
The leafs depth is just too weak
Are people still trying to defend this team!?
I get that the distribution of wealth is bad but our top 4 forwards as a whole are better than all 3 of those teams top 4 forwards so it makes sense that they’re paid that way. Unfortunately we didn’t luck into that shiny number 1 D to break up the allocation of the cap. Vegas is a little different because they don’t have a superstar just a bunch really fucking good guys.
The biggest reason why the cap is even an issue is because of a once in a lifetime event that shut the league down and stagnated the cap. I know that no team has ever won with a salary distribution like ours but that’s only the case until it happens. There’s no right way to build a champion.
I’m definitely pissed that the team is the way it is but I don’t think the fact that the core 4 are all forwards is the problem. The problem is that the core 4 guys don’t have that killer instinct
I think this chart shows that the Leafs will win the cup in 23/24.
The Leafs paid their stars expecting the salary cap to surge, it did not.
The last three Cup champs all had their star players contracts come up post-Covid when teams knew the cap was flat or a few years prior to 2020 so they still got a couple years of cap increase.
If you want more accurate measurements, take % of team cap in the year the deals were signed, then convert it to % of team cap based on today’s cap.
You’ll see the discrepancy.
A lot of replies here seem to think this is an attack on the core 4 which it isn’t. Nobody is saying they aren’t good actually they are awesome players but the fact remains it’s very hard if not impossible to win in the nhl without depth players and you will need to pay for that with more than what’s left after the core 4 are paid. If this was the nba the leafs would be a super team but because of the way playoff hockey is played it’s just not realistic to think these 4 guys will carry the leafs to the promised land without help. Of course this wouldn’t be an issue if there was no salary cap but here we are.
They should have traded one of Matthews, Marner or Nylander last summer.
To be fair though, both Tampa and Vegas got to roll like 10 mill extra over the cap and into “rest of team salaries” with good timing on IR players. If the leafs rolled JT onto the IR for the year and spent 11 mill upgrading the team, we’d look different on the chart too
Had the cap increased as expected this would not be a problem.
Toronto’s problem, among other things, is we play for the name on the back not the crest on the front. It’s not exactly a well kept secret that Toronto will pay you well and you don’t have to produce. Sure us fans and the media are nuts and that means that players stop giving a fuck real quick. We need to build a culture where players want to win, not just get the big paycheque.