No-Move Clauses, Trade Speculation and You

A few days ago, I was thinking to myself that Leafs fans needed several interventions last summer to stop assuming trading Mitch Marner was a breeze – one raised by the waiving of his full NMC – and now they needed a new one to stop assuming the Leafs have any control over his leaving as a UFA.

And then it occurred to me that this is really the same issue. The heavy resistance to taking a player's NMC seriously is all bound up in the, well, sorry, this sounds portentous and pretentious both, but it is the right words for it – the dehumanization of players in fan discourse. The other way to put it, not much better, is that the player's agency (and their agent) is ignored entirely in speculation by everyone. This is the season of reporters with no news to report falling back on speculation. "Could" season. Everyone is at it.

The affronted argument I got back last summer when I kept repeating the acronym NMC was that lots and lots of players have waived their NMCs, and therefore this is totally legitimate to expect a trade of Mitch Marner a year too late. In truth, a lot of the players in question waived full or partial no-trade clauses, but there have been players who agreed to waive an NMC, and they all had something in common: they wanted to be traded. So again, no matter whether the NMC is used to force a team into compliance or waived to afford a trade, the player is deciding.

A year too late?

This is the key point that links this summer and last, and it's the summer before, the year of the great divorce when glasses man bad was replaced by a guy inconveniently wearing glasses ruining the meme. Maybe this situation looks different through our newly tuned hindsight goggles, speaking of eyewear. But at the time in 2023 it looked like this:

Mitch Marner has a no-move clause in his contract that takes effect... tick, tick, tick... on July 1 of this year.

So what do you do if you're Treliving? While it's true Dubas was ejected from the Leafs leaving behind a pretty clean slate and no big messes, he did have this one ticking time bomb in his desk drawer. Do you set it off now, and just go for it? Trade Marner for the best combination of winger and defender you can get and build around that starting with the Nylander extension?

Do you wait a year and think you can get him to waive that no-move for you? He's been so, so accommodating on contract issues in the past, you know, I think he— ha ha ha, as if!

The choice is this: trade him now, or else in a year you can either re-sign him for a massive amount or let him play out the season and walk for nothing. Does Treliving want another Tkachuk, a Huberdeau or a Gaudreau? He gets to pick. And the decision gets made now.

I recycled that metaphor a year later after Brad Treliving had made his choice, so if you really want to revisit last year:

What I got out of a re-read is just sadness that Gaudreau had taken control of his future – so he believed – and now the only consolation is that he spent some time closer to his family while he still had it.

Last summer, this was true:

[Leaving as a UFA] is the threat that hangs over any negotiation about waiving the NMC or extending Marner's contract with the Leafs. It's always the fallback. It's the likely outcome if the relationship sours. If the Leafs try to make him leave, this is how he'll go. If they accidentally piss him off, this is how he'll go.

And so we are here today with the almost certain outcome that he is going. If the claim is to be made that Treliving "let him go for nothing" you have to mean in 2023. If you don't, you're quite wrong. The Leafs lost all power when the NMC came into effect.

When I said we may view 2023 differently now, well, did Treliving himself have the power to choose to trade Marner then? In public statements, Treliving cast himself as taking that season to see what the Leafs were really all about and what they needed, and he certainly made substantial changes this past year and only minor additions in 2023. But no matter if it was him, Brendan Shanahan or whoever was acting as MLSE CEO at that time who had the final say, the choice to give Marner the power to walk as a UFA was made on June 30, 2023.

The NMC is why he wasn't traded last summer or at the deadline. The NMC is why the Leafs aren't now letting him do anything. It's not up to them.

Now look at this:

15. Morgan Rielly
Left Defense, Toronto Maple Leafs
Age: 31
Stats: 82 GP, 7 G, 34 A, 41 Pts
Contract: 5 years remaining, $7.5 million AAV
Scoop: The Leafs need a puck-moving defenseman, someone who can help get them out of trouble efficiently and exiting the zone with more ease. Rielly isn’t that anymore. He’s been a fine playoff contributor, surprisingly enough, but he isn’t an effective quarterback on the first power play unit and his game showed significant signs of slowing down this season. Should the Leafs make a move before that contract becomes onerous?

Daily Faceoff is not going to be the only outlet to write something like this. Morgan Rielly is this year's guy who needs to be traded already. He's going to make all the lists. The sheer number of times someone said in portentous tones last summer that Mitch Marner should be traded and laid out a logical reason why – just like this – and never once even alluded to the NMC was not small.

I could accept the idea that standard hockey media assumes fans don't understand contract clauses, but then, you know, maybe spell it out with more than three letters? Something like this isn't lying. It's not even quite lying by omission because it is possible for Morgan Rielly to choose to be traded. But it's snuggling right up to misinformation in order to avoid reporting this idea for what it really is – not up to the Leafs.

Offseason