Leafs will have around $25 million in cap space to work with in offseason

Even though the Toronto Maple Leafs are not even ten games into their season, it’s never too early to speculate about what the future could hold.

For what is arguably the NHL’s most scrutinized team, the questions surrounding the Leafs often centre around which players are in Toronto for the long haul and which might be on the outs in the near future.

Toronto helped answer questions about one of those players: defenceman Jake McCabe, who signed a five-year extension earlier today. But there’s still plenty of uncertainty around how the rest of the roster will shake out moving forward, given the major contracts that Brad Treliving still has to decide if he can fit into the lineup.

Toronto’s two biggest question marks remain the future of John Tavares and Mitch Marner, half of the franchise’s “core four” forwards that have been a staple of the team since the former joined the Leafs in 2018 as a free agent. With Tavares now in the final year of his seven-year contract — and Marner in the last year of his — every one of Treliving’s key decisions over the next season when it comes to roster construction could impact the future of those two players.

The NHL salary cap is set for $88 million this season but is expected to continue rising in the coming years.

As per PuckPedia, the Leafs now have $66,230,021 committed in contracts for next season. If the salary cap number rises to 90 million, the Leafs will have $23,769,979 in free space heading into the summer, whereas you can add two million to that total should it rise to $92 million. Either way, the Leafs will have a ballpark range of $25 million to work with, should the cap’s growth remain on brand with consistent trends.

“I predict that it will continue to go up,” NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said in June. “Obviously, with the number of years we had with flat or modest increases it was necessary to recapture how much was overpaid and how much the escrow built up during COVID, but I believe we’re going to continue to see robust growth in the cap.”

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