Wednesday's FTB: It's time to get to know the team

Today, and running throughout training camp, we begin a feature here to help us all understand the new players on the team. There are a lot of them. When a host of them were signed on July 1 within minutes or hours of each other, it was difficult to sort out who was who. They had a sameness to them – age, type of player, where they were likely to play.

The sameness has been grossly overstated. The other issue is that they were all signed while expectations were mired in a past and hadn't caught up to the realities of cap inflation. That was then, and this is the world in which Fraser Minten is getting $7 million to be a 3C. While I don't think that contract should be seen as a benchmark, it likely will be. I also don't think applying inflation to all player roles should be done equally. But that's only fair, you may think, but life and the NHL ain't fair.

The cap has to me met. Its job is to make teams make comprises, and yes I know you hate it and you want the Leafs to be a juggernaut with a star at every position and in that cap-free world, the Rangers and the Canadiens are just weirdly not able to match the Leafs, but that's an argument about an alternative reality. In this world, the goal is to spend the cap dollars wisely. You can't achieve perfect efficiency, but you can avoid dumping so much cap into your lowest value players that you have to compromise on the ones who matter. Or have to tell the press they should take a discount like you didn't when you were a player if you're Brendan Shanahan.

As we go through the new players, we should consider what it means that the aggregate bottom six is fairly expensive now, even considering inflation. There aren't five guys on minimum salary, naturally enough, but there aren't five guys under $2 million either. The big barrier to understanding that end of the salary spectrum is that there really aren't any guys on minimum salary in the NHL anymore. That was a flat-cap anomaly, and prior to those days, when the cap gently rose every year, the lowest a player would take to not be insulted was $1 million. That number is more like three million now. Or soon will be. And that's for a veteran on a one-year deal before he retires, not every player thought of as depth.

There are conflicting forces operating on the middle to lower tiers of player salaries, and how a team handles that will affect their ultimate outcomes. However, for the Leafs, and for reading these profiles, term is the key, not the AAV. The plan Chayka has for this season, and the immediate aftermath is pretty obvious.

I am extremely optimistic about this season for quite a few reasons:

Gavin McKenna
In writing about the lesser players, it was very refreshing to not have to use a lot of "ifs". If all goes well Domi might fit okay with Matthews. If he never plays, it won't matter that Reaves is there. If Klingberg was just bad because of the Ducks...
Several of the forces making Matthew Knies perform very poorly are fixed. He recognized he was carrying too much weight and that and his injuries had a nice feedback loop because of that wearing away at his ability.
Auston Matthews got the knee-surgery-enforced rest he likely needed.
The bottom two lines appear to have defined roles and/or identities and there doesn't seem to be a junk drawer line on the entire team. Yay!
The PK might not suck.
The PP is going to change by default and sometimes when you change something, you re-examine all your assumptions and figure out why it was crap in the first place.
I think this is a playoff team. How that works in the Atlantic is what the season will reveal.

Some things to know:

Under the new CBA, players with at least 100 games of NHL experience are restricted to playing in two exhibitions.

There are four games. The Leafs chose to do two pairs of split squad games with one pair this Saturday and the other next Wednesday. We should expect McKenna (and anyone else) to play in two games only regardless of the rules.

Yesterday was sign them under the old rules day, and there were a few. Still to be resolved as camps open is:

Connor Hellebuyck
That deeply uncomfortable deal in Detroit with Dylan Larkin
Cutter Gauthier, Adam Fantilli, Alexander Nikishin, and Simon Edvinsson, which is a lot of unsigned RFAs.

Also today the final votes will be posted so you can review how everyone voted and how that compared to the community vote all in one place. That will formally end the T25.

From The Branches