If you want to say that he was trying to get as much money as possible, that’s fine but be he admitted that he was seeking an 8 year deal to start. He didn’t handcuff the team by only wanting to sign for 5 years.
*Matthews began seeking an eight-year contract. Talks would often go quiet. A couple of weeks ago a six-hour meeting in Toronto appeared to be the breakthrough in getting the deal done.*
The deal to sign Auston Matthews to an $11.634 million annual contract includes a full no-move clause in the final year of the contract.
www.forbes.com
Also, funny to note that Marner and his camp went to Toronto looking for 8 years by 9 million the year before he signed and Toronto turned them down.
The five-year term for Matthews is less than the eight-year contract that Connor McDavid, the No. 1 pick in the 2015 NHL Draft, signed with the Edmonton Oilers on July 5, 2017,
but Matthews said the term was by design to help the Maple Leafs retain the financial flexibility to keep its young core together.
The shorter deal is reminiscent of the five-year deal Tampa Bay Lightning star Steven Stamkos signed after the expiration of his entry-level deal in 2011, and the six-year extension Matthews’s current teammate John Tavares inked with the New York Islanders that same year.
Both players, for various reasons, forwent longer deals so they could hit free agency at a younger age."
which does not help the Leafs in any way, but it does help Auston Matthews negotiate a much larger contract with having more eligible suitors, so one supposes there's that
as far as Marner is concerned "Mirtle wrote on Friday that the Maple Leafs have offered Marner between just under $9 million to roughly $11 million per season on his new deal based on term. Mirtle writes that the Leafs have discussed three, six and seven-year deals with Marner’s camp, who are thought to be uninterested in the max eight-year term.
Mirtle adds that the
"general consensus" is that Marner's camp initially asked for Auston Matthews' contract - a five-year deal at a $11.6 million cap hit - before countering an eight-year offer from the Leafs with a three-year, $30 million bridge contract.
"It's just really the status quo at this point," Dubas told TSN. "And I think the reality is, it's the status quo with all these types of players throughout the league. There doesn't seem to be anything really transpiring, and as it gets into August, it's kind of into a bit of a slog where there doesn't seem to be any real progress, you don't even hear of any progress in any of the other situations."
despite all that gibbering jabber that warbaggalled as jabberwocky out of Dubas there, it was just him actually realizing he may have frigged up by opening himself and the team up to a good ol' jolly rodgering as they used to say at one time in old blighty!
The Leafs have been in a cap jail of their own making since, it's almost guaranteed that they have set themselves up to lose one of MM, Will or Matty! Depending upon whom is the next GM is, as long as the loss is not to UFA they may be able to at least turn the loss into a kind of win, the kind of pyrrhic victory Edmonton had when Gretzky was used to save hockey is SoCal.
