The Toronto Maple Leafs and the continuing saga of restricted free agent Mitch Marner will likely be front and center on sports talk radio and in Toronto newspapers for the rest of the summer, after the departure of Kawhi Leonard to the Los Angeles Clippers and the rebuilding Toronto Blue Jays being a non-story. The only notable event involving the Blue Jays will end on July 31, when they decide whether to trade Marcus Stroman and/or Aaron Sanchez before the MLB trade deadline.
The chatter about a potential offer sheet that emanated this week was curiously timed, with the news cycle focused on the Leonard saga and the majority of the NHL’s insiders off to cottage country and unavailable to elaborate or investigate.
Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman reported on Friday that one team considered signing Marner to an offer sheet, but that team was interested in signing the 22-year-old winger to “big term” (which likely means a deal of six or seven years), while the winger’s camp is looking for more of a shorter term deal.
Friedman’s report is consistent with Marner looking for a deal similar to what Montreal gave to center Sebastian Aho, but it is tough to imagine another team risking the loss of four first-round picks and setting up the winger for another big payday on a shorter term deal.
Although the Montreal Canadiens’ offer sheet to Aho appeared to be a fairly weak attempt, it made sense for the 21-year-old center, who was facing the prospect of a low-ball eight-year deal from the fiscally “restrained” Hurricanes, taking a one-year qualifying offer or going down the same path as William Nylander and denying his services through training camp.
With the offer sheet, Aho got more than half of the $42.27 Million deal in the first 12 months and becomes an unrestricted free agent at 26 years old. The problem with the Canadiens bid was that there was little chance that Carolina was not going to match it, unless Canes owner Thomas Dundon couldn’t come up with all the front money.
It does make sense that Marner’s camp would prefer a short second contract (since there are no no-trade or no-movement protections possible), and the Leafs might be amenable to a two-or-three year deal if the cap hit was considerably less than what Auston Matthews and John Tavares are making.
A two-or-three-year deal would get Marner closer to unrestricted free agency and make him arbitration-eligible after it expires. If the deal was structured in a similar way to how Timo Meier’s four-year contract was in San Jose (with the final year’s salary at $10 Million), the arbitration settlement or award could be higher than that, but the AAV would have to be in the $7 to 8 Million range to make sense for GM Kyle Dubas.
A four-year contract would walk Marner to UFA at 26 years old, while five years would have him become a free agent the same summer as Matthews and Nylander.
Any deal longer than that would likely have an AAV close to or more than Matthews and Tavares, which would probably force the Leafs to trade off a contract (Nylander’s $6.9 Million) to open up cap space.
The threat of an offer sheet will decrease as we go deeper into the summer and teams sign UFA’s or re-sign their own restricted free agents. That means that the eventual compromise for both sides will be a bridge deal. The only thing left to be determined is the amount, but don’t expect either side to resolve this quickly.
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