Auston Matthews and the Maple Leafs wake up this morning to a cap picture that looks nothing like the one that boxed them in for years.
Entering training camp, not a single Leaf was in a contract year. Everyone on the roster was locked up through 2027-28 at minimum.
The cap is projected to hit $127.5 million in 2028-29.
By then, Toronto already has 12 players signed for a combined $71 million.
That leaves $56.5 million to pay Matthews and fill the gaps. Strange feeling for a franchise that spent the flat-cap years as the league's favourite cautionary tale.
The forward commitments run deep. William Nylander, John Tavares, Kirill Marchenko, Gavin McKenna, Nick Paul and Brandon Duhaime are all locked in as everyday forwards.
Sergei Bobrovsky and Anthony Stolarz are signed too. So is a top four of Darren Raddysh, Morgan Rielly, Chris Tanev and Jake McCabe.
Toronto's aging blue line is the bill nobody wants to read
Think of it like locking a mortgage rate the week before the bank hikes it. Deals that looked fat under a flat cap suddenly read like bargains once the ceiling moves.
Toronto's new general manager skipped the summer's spending spree on unproven kids, and he made no apology for it. "For me, I was comfortable to sit that one out," he said.
Here's the part that ages badly. Tanev is 36, McCabe and Rielly are both 32, and all three are baked into the 2028-29 plan.
Raddysh carries an $8,500,000 cap hit, the biggest on the Toronto back end. He's already gone minus-3 through two games.
Committing that much money to that much mileage on the blue line is the wrong bet. The league keeps getting faster, and those contracts will still be on the books when it does.
Elsewhere, teams went the other direction. Anaheim's Pat Verbeek handed Tristan Luneau six years and $43.2 million this week, after the defenceman had played all of 14 NHL games.
And the Ducks did it while still reeling from the Leo Carlsson offer sheet. Carlsson now owns an $18,000,000 cap hit, the biggest number in the league.
So who's right? Toronto's GM called his group "in the risk-mitigation business," and admitted some of those early paydays will look great while others turn into regrets.
The irony is thick, since the Leafs were the team most often cited as hamstrung by the pandemic flat cap. Their spend-to-the-ceiling habit now lines them up nicely for the spike.
The present is messier. Matthews is still looking for his first point of the season and sits at minus-2.
Meanwhile, Easton Cowan leads the team with three points on a $900,000 cap hit, including a power-play goal and the game-winner. That's exactly the kind of cheap production the spike era rewards.
The crease is its own question. Bobrovsky has opened with an .875 save percentage while Stolarz sits at .963, and both are part of that 2028-29 math.
The Senators visit tonight with Toronto at 1-1-0, four goals for and four against.
The spreadsheet looks great for 2028-29. Whether this blue line still looks like a top four when the money finally kicks in is a different story.
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Should the Maple Leafs move one of their aging defencemen before the 2028-29 cap spike?
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