The Leafs don't have a cap space problem

Over the last few months as the Leafs tried and came short on hitting the level of play needed to make the playoffs this year, I've seen a lot of comments about cap space. Now, I realize the Leafs operated over the cap for years, using LTIR and complex retention moves to add players, but this year's team has never been "cap-strapped". They don't have cap issues and they never have, helped along by some epic bad luck.

The Leafs have been able to operate with 23 players all season, while at times they've had to make some hasty moves, not for cap space, but to not go over that limit while players were injured. They have never been fully healthy.

At the start of the season, the Leafs did a little fiddle to get the correct cap figure for future LTIR purposes when they had to put Marshall Rifai on LTIR due to a training camp injury. He would have been in the AHL otherwise. They still had 23 healthy players on the roster.

If we go back to the summer when various trades and signings brought in a clutch of new players in the sub $4 million price range, the team was obviously overloaded, not just in cap hits, but in total bodies. There was a great deal of talk about moving out players like Nick Robertson, David Kämpf and Calle Järnkrok. In the end they chose the new guys over Kämpf, and made no other moves other than to release their two waiver claims back into the wild.

Remember them? Sammy Blais and Cayden Primeau, claimed on opening day because the Leafs started the season short of players.

So, even with multiple players on IR at various times – where their cap hits still count – there was never a moment where cap space was the problem. In an imaginary alternate world where the Leafs played the first two months of the season the way they played the next two, there was opportunity to subtract extra players if necessary to add new ones. In the end, they claimed Troy Stecher, and that was it.

There is one player hurt now, Chris Tanev, and he is on LTIR at the regular LTIR limit of $3.8 million (and change). The Leafs have 24 players on the roster – 23 healthy and Tanev – and they have cap space, even including Tanev's full hit, of just over $400,000. If he becomes healthy and no one else is injured or traded away, then some defenceman comes off the roster and that number jumps up to over a million.

In an even more exciting alternate universe where the Leafs are adding at the deadline, they have accrued what will likely be just over $5 million in deadline cap space (the amount of cap hits that can be added, taking into account the proration of the deals and use of the LTIR pool dollar-for-dollar). They are projected by Puckpedia to finish the year with over $1 million in regular space with no changes made (the same calculation as above).

It is not outside the realm of possibility that the Leafs may add players at this deadline. Part of capitalizing on their surplus and their cap space is the ability to take back players teams need to move out to make space for other trades.

That's right now. Next year is a whole different picture. While the Leafs don't have a lot of UFAs and Bobby McMann, Scott Laughton, Calle Järnkrok and Troy Stecher add up to less than $6 million, they also have a couple of RFAs they may or may not keep on the roster.

If you carry forward this roster right now, the total hit is approximately $82 million on 18 players, leaving $21.7 million in space. And the same opportunity exists to remove players, particularly in the bottom half of the lineup where there is no trade protection.

When the time comes that the roster looks up to the task, they can cull the number down below 23 again to maximize the cap hit on the ice at any one time.

The Leafs – on purpose, not because they are just so stupid – added players last summer who were overpaid. They did this because cap space is their biggest asset and there were no real Mitch Marner replacements on the market. None of these players are awful or bad or big mistakes. Matias Maccelli, for example, has proved to be a reasonable middle six winger, and he's hardly overpaid unless you're living in the world where everyone not a star gets paid a million.

Why back in my day, we played for free and we liked it.

For free! We paid them to play. And we liked it! We thanked them!

It's entirely possible the Leafs will keep adding players with bigger cap hits than are perfectly efficient either right now or in the summer. But the future is unpredictable in the short term. Despite the simple rhetoric of selling or buying as absolutes, teams make decision for the short and long term, and also in response to the players available as well as their own situation.

They can do simple arithmetic. They know the cap situation, and they know how to use it to try to get some advantage in what is a very tough situation to navigate towards a better team. And yes, they actually do know the team isn't very good as is.