Operate in the world you live in, not the one you want.
- Lt. Riggs
NHL teams talk of long term building and sustained success.
But that's a fantasy.
The NHL and pro sports in general operate on one principle: Win the Championship or you're a loser.
The regular season is an 82 game grind that is long enough to (mostly) weed out the contenders from the pretenders and give the regression police time to do their jobs.
On the other hand, the Playoffs are a set of best-of-seven elimination matches which are influenced by luck to a degree most people absolutely refuse to acknowledge.
Yet we venerate the winning of the short tournament and barely care at all who won the President's Trophy.
Furthermore, we don't even acknowledge teams that almost win championships. Losing in the Stanley Cup Final is an amazing accomplishment. In most non-professional sports situations, second place is a pretty big deal. Plus, once you make it that far, whether or not you actually win is somewhat of a coin-flip.
But we do not care at all.
If we were fair, we'd consider the Buffalo Bills trip to four straight Super Bowls one of the greatest accomplishments in all of sports history.
But we aren't fair, they didn't win and instead of being recognized for their insane accomplishment, they are a punchline.
My point isn't to convince you that we should adopt logic to a game which requires grown men to wear $200 shirts with other grown men's names on them. Rather, I'd have you realize that since WINNING is held in such high esteem, it would make sense to concentrate your efforts to win into a certain period of time, rather than hold back a little so that you aren't complete garbage later.
The 1997 Florida Marlins know what I'm talking about.
What I'm saying is NHL GMs should start to fully recognize the importance of Championships within the culture where they work.
If they did, we'd see a lot more teams going "all in" in order to win Championships.
For instance, let's look at the Oilers.
They currently have Connor McDavid making $900K instead of 9 Million. They also have Puljujarvi and Draisaitl on minimum cap hits.
Eventually these three players will most likely cost the Oilers about 25% of their Cap, once they earn their second contracts.
Currently, they combine to cost less than half of one of their older good players.
That is why the Taylor Hall trade was so stupid. You can't get another Taylor Hall, but you can approximate another Adam Larsson, and they should have just thrown future draft picks at the other team until they got a deal.
You require a ton of luck to win in the NHL, but the Salary Cap creates a system in which a smart team can take advantage of other teams and thus lessen their dependence on lady luck. We saw this last year when the Leafs and Coyotes used their real world dollars to free up cap space for other teams by taking on bad contracts in years they had no reason to attempt to compete.
But there is another way to take advantage of the Cap, and that is to collect a bunch of rookies who are really, really good, and really really cheap, and then burn down your entire future in order to build a stacked team for the window where they will all be on entry-level contracts.
Other than the Oilers, the Leafs are in a prime position to do this. Like the Oilers, they currently have three potential super-star players combining to make less money than Leo Komarov does. And they have an even deeper roster of young players than the Oilers do.
Instead of a "Five Year Rebuild" they should go all-in and try and win the Cup next season.
Think about it: if they win, they will be legendary and no one will care if they aren't that good for a while after. But also, no matter what, they'll still have Austin Matthews, so it's not even gonna be that bad.
Secondly, only one player (Zaitsev) who matters to them is going to have their contract expire after this year and they'll have over 20 million dollars in cap space.
That doesn't even account for the fact that Horton and Lupul would go back on the LTIR and Bozak could be traded, freeing up another $15 million.
The Leafs have all their Draft Picks plus an extra 2 second rounders.
They are off to a very bad start, standings-wise.
So, in order to make the best use of their ECL window, the first thing they have to do is trade their unprotected first-round pick for next season. They have to do it now before their goalie gets better and people realize they aren't going to pick first.
That pick and a token prospect or decent NHL player can probably get you a pretty big fish. Let's say Jacob Trouba.
Then you take your next three years worth of firsts and package them for another player - let's say LA wanted to re-tool, so you ask for Muzzin. They won't do it for three firsts? Will they do four? What's it take? Cause if it's not gonna play for you next year, who cares?
Since it looks like Nylander / Matthews is too good to break up, you could (after the the season) send three or four seconds and a couple prospects to the Lightning for Tyler Johnson.
Then you back up a truck to Kevin Shattenkirk's house and just dump money into his driveway on July 1st.
And you would still probably have around 8-10 or so million in Cap Space while having the best roster in the NHL by a preposterous margin. Certainly you'd have one of the best defensive groups in the history of the NHL.
The best part is, the players you have to fill in the lineup and/or add to trades are incredible prospects in their own right: Kasperi Kapanen, Connor Brown, Brandon Leipsic, Andreas Johnson, Jeremy Bracco, Zach Hymen, Seth Griffith, Nikita Soshnikov, Dmytro Timashov etc. etc. etc.
You would get two kicks at the can with this roster to try and win a Cup with the best coach in the game. You'd have to re-tool after that, but even then, you'd probably end up being a top team for few years until you'd have to pay for moving four years of draft picks.
In conclusion, in a salary cap world, building for the future is a bad idea that doesn't correctly take into account the leeway you get from winning even once, the true odds of ever winning a championship even if you do build a traditionally good team, or the advantage you can take from having first-line players making league minimum cap-hits while on their entry level contracts.
In the case of the Leafs and Oilers, this is exponentially true because they have two ECL players who figure to be the two best players in the NHL before their current deals are even up.
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