Rumor: Kypreos says Matthews will be 13.5M (Haggling over term)

[Doug Prishpreed]

Well it’s not matthews fault when dubas gave into his demands. But with that said, if matthews #1 priority is money therefore maximizing his caphit therefore hindering the team, then his attitude is his fault. Crosby left money on the table, so did mcdavid.

...so did McKinnon, so did Stamkos...

 

[Haatley]

Fair... by that standard here are a bunch of players who are not near the top of the league due to time missed

MacKinnon
Kucherov
Crosby
Barkov
Marchand
Makar
Petterson
Hughes

There is a lot...

Mackinnon? Who played less games than Matthews and finished with over 20 points more than Matthews last season? With multiple top 5 point finishes? And a cup.

Kucherov? Who's has led the league in scoring with multiple top 5 finishes? Including last season?

Crosby? Who is passed his prime and still scored more points than Matthews last season? What had he accomplished in the league at the same age as Matthews?

Hughes!? Interesting pick here. He's 22. He came into the league under sized and had a rough first 2 seasons. Last year was his first fully healthy. At 22 he outscored Matthews by a large margin.

I think your list was a little ambitious to try and prove a point.

 

[TBF1972]

We love when players have more value than their contract as fans, but it's only our greed doing the thinking when in reality these guys just got screwed over by their billionaire boss.

Screwed? They are paid millions to play a game they love.

 

[Strangle]

One thing I don’t understand is why the AAV is fixed if the term isn’t. If the shortest term is what the player wants, why aren’t we seeing an AAV reduction to match the flexibility?

Matthews wants to be paid what he’s worth today, and paid what he was worth tomorrow.

He won’t take an AAV discount, he might think 13.5m is a discount, who knows.

The concerning thing for me, is if there is a NMC on the last year of the deal. The way he’s been signing contracts looks like he will want max term after this deal, where you might get 2-3 years of prime Matthews play, at prime Matthews prices, but with 5 extra years of lowered production at that inflated price.

If there is any signs of slowing down on this contract, you need to keep the door open to trading him before you lock him up on the next contract for huge dollars and declining play.

 

[rojac]

I think the circumstances are uniquely allowing this to be the Most Effective Tactic Available (META) for players with regard to contract negotiation.

The covid years flattened the cap, with a lot of noise about large cap rises in coming seasons.

This has given players/agents the idea that a long term deal now, could be leaving a lot of money on the table when the cap rises.

Fans all thought this would help teams by signing players to long term contracts (because why wouldn’t they want to sign long term? They always have in the past), and lock them in to a cap hit that will become a lower and lower percentage over the course of the contract.

Agents have figured this out from the other side and it looks like we are seeing them start to advise players to sign shorter contracts while the cap is low, presumably to sign the longer term contract to end their career at the highest possible cap the league has at the time of signing.

Something should really try to account for this in the next CBA, if this becomes true META in player contracts it will not be good for the league (although the NHLPA probably loves it)

During the the negotiations for the 2013 CBA I seem to recall that owners wanted maximum term to be 4 and 5 years and the players compromised at 7 and 8. Maybe this will bring both sides on board with a shorter maximum term.

 

[Dr Jan Itor]

Not worth it.

 

[Beukeboom Fan]

Have to correct you there. Rich teams fans didn't care lol. Others did. Most teams had an internal cap. Edmonton, for example, was like tops 32sh I think. A team like Vancouver was like 40-45M. They lost Dough Weight to ST, who gave him like double what EDM offered. Joseph to Toronto. Guerin got maxed out. On and on it went.

100% agree. As an old time fan, folks who didn't live through the pre-cap era have a fundemental lack of understand just how demoralizing it was to have your team be an official speed-bump because another owner was willing to subsidize their team to win. The Wings salary was 3x that of the Capitals when they curb stomped them in the Cup finals. Same with EDM getting repeatly pwned in the first round by Dallas until Marchant beat them in OT. People get salty now about the LTIR issue in the P/O's - imagine something like 4x that differential.

 

[TBF1972]

Yep, and Matthews is a star Forward that actually defends and does it well, unlike pure scorers like Ovechkin and Kovalchuk.
In a logical world that would add value, but it's usually all about dem points with GMs.

do you really compare 36 year old ovechkin to 24 year old matthews?

funny guy

 

[CupofOil]

If it's a short term deal (3 years), that AAV has come in at less than $13.5m. That's a big L for the Leafs if true. That thing better be a max or near max term deal at that AAV.

 

[Strangle]

This. Players should have been doing this for years. But this good ole boy league has forced and controlled how deals are given. Glad the new generation is tryin to modernize nhl. The fact that not all the gms speak to each other is hilarious and should never have been leaked. Makes this look like a shitty private business. And we see it in how rules that apply to one team dont to another. Player power was always coming ... took 2 decades longer than it should have.

Owners aren’t screwing the players here. The cap is a percentage of earnings and that is spread out over the entire roster of players.

Sure, some teams have unspent cap, which is money that players aren’t earning (and I don’t know where that money goes, or if it just goes back to the owners or into an account with the NHLPA or distributed another way), it’s not at all relevant because competitive teams spend as much of the cap as they possibly can, meaning the players as a group are getting as much money as they possibly can already.

What you’re saying is that the salary inequity between players should be larger. With superstars making 10-20x (or more) than the lowest paid players.

You see this in the NFL, where running backs just don’t make money anymore. It happens a little more in the NHL with goalies as well.

It has nothing to do with players sticking it to the league, it only means players at the top stick it to other players by taking a bigger piece of the pie.

The only way to raise salaries across the board is to raise league revenue, which is why the gambling ads are so prevalent. Gambling drives revenue in the other leagues, especially NFL and NBA (baseball is weird, I don’t know why baseball makes as much revenue as they do, except the whole ‘Americas pastime’)

This idea is also why Bettman has been so desperate to grow the game in the US. Those markets have made the NBA and NFL revenues absolutely insane, which is why you see $20m one year deals for those athletes.

The NBA is also unique, in that there are only half as many players to pay, but the league makes much much more money than the NHL.

 

[Strangle]

Crazy that 13.5m is what a role player off the bench gets in the NBA

It’s all tied directly to league revenue. The NBA makes a lot more money than the NHL does.

 

[Beukeboom Fan]

$13.5M is only $900k more than Mackinnon AAV, and Mackinnon took a massive discount on his UFA price. Haggling over a million here or there with a player in the Matthews tier is missing the forest for the trees. You can save a million elsewhere pretty easily (e.g. don't sign Reaves). Even if it is an overpayment (I disagree), I'd rather overpay to keep an elite player than overpay Klingberg by $2M or something.

Here's why I disagree with the above. Reeves is within spitting distance of making the league minimum, so you don't pick up much by replacing him.

Compare Point to AM. At 13.5M AM is going to be making $4M more than Point. To make up that difference the Leafs have to have 2 roster spots making the league minimum instead of paying 2 guys who contribute and make about $3M'ish each. That's the equivalent of Vegas having Whitecloud and Chandler on the team instead of some kid on ELC or league minimum roster filler (obviously - 2 optimal examples and not all roster spots would be fille by these types of player, but this did happen last year). Note - this difference just gets significantly worse in 3 years (assuming that term), because Point committed long term and AM would probably be $15+M given the increase in the cap.

"Core" players have decision to a decision to make. Do I trust the team to make a smart decision if I take less than I could salary wise knowing that means there's more talent on the team which increases the chances that we're successful together?

 

[Colorado Avalanche]

I'd trade him. No way they're going to win a cup paying multiple players >$10mil in a hard cap world. Depth wins cups.

You don't win without elite playes

 

[TMLeafer]

I say 5 years would be perfect.

 

[Stephen]

Matthews wants to be paid what he’s worth today, and paid what he was worth tomorrow.

He won’t take an AAV discount, he might think 13.5m is a discount, who knows.

The concerning thing for me, is if there is a NMC on the last year of the deal. The way he’s been signing contracts looks like he will want max term after this deal, where you might get 2-3 years of prime Matthews play, at prime Matthews prices, but with 5 extra years of lowered production at that inflated price.

If there is any signs of slowing down on this contract, you need to keep the door open to trading him before you lock him up on the next contract for huge dollars and declining play.

The thing that annoys me about this contract discussion as reported is he’s trying to cap inflation proof it by high AAV dollars and a short term. So if Toronto is already happy to pay a next generation AAV why is there also a concession on a shortest term possible so he can be on the cutting edge again in X years?

 

[Rabid Ranger]

Not worth it.

What is he worth?

 

[Strangle]

The thing that annoys me about this contract discussion as reported is he’s trying to cap inflation proof it by high AAV dollars and a short term. So if Toronto is already happy to pay a next generation AAV why is there also a concession on a shortest term possible so he can be on the cutting edge again in X years?

This is why I think the next CBA should dictate some sort of cap percentage contract negotiation, where a player signs for xx.xx% of whatever the cap is in whatever years the contract covers.

If this was the case, matthews would want to maximize the years. He would have signed 8 years at 14% of the cap, because essentially his agent is trying to not let his cap percentage fall more than a point before he can sign his next contract, bringing it up to 14-15% again.

This is terrible for a team looking to have the cap percentage come down in later years, obviously. But if you signed a player to just a percentage of the cap instead of real dollars, you would probably negotiate a lower percentage, and sell it to the player as “the cap will go up, this 10% will keep getting bigger in dollars. It could be $20m in the final year of your deal”

 

[dirtydanglez]

What is he worth?

if mack is 12.6x8 matthews should be about 12.25x8.

 

[Dr Jan Itor]

What is he worth?

Less

 

[Stephen]

This is why I think the next CBA should dictate some sort of cap percentage contract negotiation, where a player signs for xx.xx% of whatever the cap is in whatever years the contract covers.

If this was the case, matthews would want to maximize the years. He would have signed 8 years at 14% of the cap, because essentially his agent is trying to not let his cap percentage fall more than a point before he can sign his next contract, bringing it up to 14-15% again.

This is terrible for a team looking to have the cap percentage come down in later years, obviously. But if you signed a player to just a percentage of the cap instead of real dollars, you would probably negotiate a lower percentage, and sell it to the player as “the cap will go up, this 10% will keep getting bigger in dollars. It could be $20m in the final year of your deal”

Yeah or maybe in a catastrophic economy the cap goes down and the % cap shrinks. Who knows? My point is Matthews is looking for no risk, all benefit, future proofing on future proofing and that just doesn’t sit well. It’s not how 99.9% of all other contacts are structured.

We are ready to give him the moon already. Again. And it seems like he kinda likes the rest of the solar system too.

 

[Suntouchable13]

You sign this contract after you win the Stanley Cup. All these contracts pretty much assure Leafs will not win with this core. Chicago did not win squat after Kane and Toews signed their big deals.

 

[ViewsFromThe6ix]

Well it’s not matthews fault when dubas gave into his demands. But with that said, if matthews #1 priority is money therefore maximizing his caphit therefore hindering the team, then his attitude is his fault. Crosby left money on the table, so did mcdavid.

My point is I don’t understand why guys like sundin get praised for being not greedy when they just took advantage of no cap. He literally got what he wanted

 

[Strangle]

Yeah or maybe in a catastrophic economy the cap goes down and the % cap shrinks. Who knows? My point is Matthews is looking for no risk, all benefit, future proofing on future proofing and that just doesn’t sit well. It’s not how 99.9% of all other contacts are structured.

We are ready to give him the moon already. Again. And it seems like he kinda likes the rest of the solar system too.

I agree, I also am starting to think that Matthews might be looking to go to UFA after this deal for his next contract.

There better not be a NMC on the final year of this deal

 

[Stephen]

My point is I don’t understand why guys like sundin get praised for being not greedy when they just took advantage of no cap. He literally got what he wanted

I think “no cap” kind of answers your question.

 

[Bouboumaster]

Excellent news