Roster cutdown day is now a week away for all 32 NHL teams.
And the Toronto Maple Leafs have one of the more jammed group of players on one-way deals still in training camp, with two preseason games left to help decide where this goes.
Teams need to be under the 23-player roster limit and $88 million salary cap by 5 p.m. ET on Oct. 7, the day before regular-season play begins in North America. (The two European dates between the Sabres and Devils this coming weekend don’t impact this deadline.)
New Leafs coach Craig Berube has wasted little time splitting his massive camp roster into the NHLers and AHLers/juniors, taking the NHL group down to only 24 players as of Wednesday. Here are those two lists, which are a good indicator of who still has a shot to make the big team.
As always, read into this what you will: the Maple Leafs have mixed up their training camp groups and we seem to have some separation between the haves and the have nots: pic.twitter.com/jO86SDPzaM
— Joshua Kloke (@joshuakloke) September 25, 2024
Missing from the NHL group, however, are Jani Hakanpää and Connor Dewar, who have both been out all camp with injuries. We’ll include them in our cap calculation and add in both Max Pacioretty and Steven Lorentz on projected contracts, to give a sense of what changes still need to come by next week.
That 26-player group looks like so, with three extra players (a forward and two defencemen) and a lineup that’s $3.7 million-ish over the cap.
Two moves I’m anticipating before the season starts will be Hakanpää and Dewar starting the year on long-term injured reserve, which will allow the Leafs to exceed the salary cap for as long as they’re out.
LTIR would mean both players have to miss the first 10 games and 24 days of the season, something that makes a lot of sense for Hakanpää given the extensive knee issues he’s dealing with. Dewar’s injury timeline is less clear, but given he’s yet to do much in camp, we’ll assume they’ll slow play his return.
Those two moves would bring the Leafs to within $1.07 million of the cap and needing to only make one more cut. The most obvious manouevre I can see to get compliant would be to place Conor Timmins on waivers, freeing up another $1.1 million, and using Marlies standout Marshall Rifai as the seventh defenceman.
Remaining cap space?
$30,033, or enough to easily afford a new Nissan Versa with some nice add-ons.
I’m not certain why capologist Brandon Pridham would leave an extra $30,333, but it could always end up being included in Pacioretty’s deal, which is awaiting some of the final cap machinations this week before they put pen to paper.
On that front, I believe it’s also possible Pacioretty gets some additional 35-plus contract bonuses added in, similar to the ones he had last season with the Capitals (albeit not to the tune of $2 million for playing 20 games). But those don’t necessarily have to count against the cap this season. More on that in a second.
Even with the injuries, it’s a good-looking roster to start the season, with some quality forward depth in the 13th and 14th holes to fight for minutes or replace banged-up players.
If this is how the Leafs start the season, what it does is buy them some more time to see how some players settle in. It pushes the decision on someone like Nick Robertson, for example, into the second month of the season, allowing Berube to play him in games that matter and contemplate if there’s an established role for him in the top nine or not.
What’s happened in camp is a factor, too. Despite his offseason trade request, Robertson feels likely to stick around given his impressive performance in the preseason so far, even when Hakanpää is ready to return. While moving out Robertson’s $875,000 and demoting Rifai would create more than enough space to activate Hakanpää, it wouldn’t allow for Dewar to also come off LTIR.
The fact he makes $405,000 more than a league minimum player like Lorentz complicates things somewhat, and in theory, could force Toronto to shed another piece.
I say “in theory” because what tends to happen in these situations is someone else gets hurt, goes on LTIR, and the team never has to face the prospect of losing a useful depth piece over an extra couple hundred grand in cap space. (Sam Lafferty excepted.)
Most NHL teams end up having at least 200-plus man-games lost throughout the course of a season and can treat LTIR as a revolving door.
There are a few limitations and caveats to that strategy for the Leafs this season, however. One is, that if they give Pacioretty easily attainable performance bonuses and finish the season in LTIR, those bonuses will count against next season’s salary cap.
That’s what happened with the Oilers last season with Connor Brown, and the top contender in the Western Conference is now carrying an ugly $3.55 million bonus overage this year.
Not ideal, to say the least, even if, as I mentioned above, Pacioretty’s bonuses aren’t likely to be anywhere near that hefty.
The other limitations to the LTIR strategy are just as tricky. Without any real cap space, the Leafs could be in tough to do much at the trade deadline without pushing out another piece and may have to include additional draft picks in order to coax teams to retain a lot of salary in the transactions. (And they’re really short on picks at the moment after trading six last season.)
The other key complicating factor I can see is: What do you do if Robertson (and/or some of the other depth players) continue to play really well and there’s not another obvious salary-shedding trade that can be made?
All of that makes me believe GM Brad Treliving has another, larger move potentially in mind here. Their commitments to Hakanpää and Pacioretty — and potentially Lorentz, too, given how Berube has been using him in the preseason — only make things crowded if the Leafs are committed to all of their pieces that make a salary of $2 million or more.
If they’re willing to shift out a more substantial piece, that dramatically changes things — and would give them room to be bigger players at the deadline, too.
I’ve noticed a lot of cap-savvy Leafs fans speculate about moving out veterans like Calle Järnkrok or David Kämpf over the past few weeks, and given Toronto’s abundance of options up front, I can see why people are going there. Robertson’s strong showing the past two weeks very well could mean that’s the route the Leafs go, and it would give them considerably more flexibility later in the year.
But I also wonder if Hakanpää is truly healthy enough to play every night by November if they might revisit moving Timothy Liljegren’s $3 million cap hit. There was a ton of smoke around potentially moving him around the draft in Las Vegas back in late June, and the contract he ultimately signed was very heavily frontloaded, with 40 percent of the two-year deal already paid out in a signing bonus on July 1 before he played a game on it.
That should make Liljegren very easy to move if he doesn’t mesh with Berube’s radically different north-south system early in the year. It’s a trade that would make more sense than keeping a $3 million seventh defenceman around and creating all kinds of cap headaches later in the season (and potentially impact next year). Not to mention the fact that Liljegren is, like Robertson, set to be rather disgruntled if he isn’t able to land a more significant role this season.
It’s not going to be workable to have him in the press box for any length of time.
In any event, all that is to say, even though the NHL’s roster deadline is coming fast, seven days from now, don’t expect that to be the last we hear of Treliving moving some of these pieces around to work around the cap.
That’s probably going to be a compelling storyline all season — including as early as November when everyone could be healthy.
(Photo of Max Pacioretty: Dan Hamilton / Imagn Images)
