The Toronto Maple Leafs have bad news after Filip Hronek was recently signed by the Vancouver Canucks to a huge contract.
Hronek inked a $58 million, eight-year contract with Vancouver. The Toronto Maple Leafs’ hopes to soon enter the market will be harmed by the deal’s $7.25 million cap hit.
For Filip Hronek, that seems like a lot of money, so the deal is definitely unexpected.
Hronek scored 48 points in 82 games during the previous campaign. Most significantly, he contributed two points during the playoffs.
Over an eight-year period, are those numbers worth almost $60 million? Is $7.25 million an annual value?
Hronek Filip Bad News Is Signed for the Toronto Maple Leafs
That being said, the goal of this conversation is not to decide whether the Canucks overpaid. I would say that they did. However, the current task is to emphasize how bad this deal is for the Toronto Maple Leafs.
There have been rumors that the Leafs are chasing elite defensemen like Chris Tanev or Nikita Zadorov. This is why the Toronto Maple Leafs should be concerned about Hronek’s deal: To acquire a blue liner that is comparable to Hronek, the club will need to spend at least $7 million.
Put another way, by overpaying for Hronek, the Canucks unintentionally disrupted the free-agent market. Now that their agents can compare Hronek’s deal to their own, nearly every free-agent blue liner must be ecstatic.
How much money would the Leafs need to spend on a player such as Chris Tanev or Brandon Montour? Player payment is not the problem. The Leafs are able to pay it. The issue is the amount of cap space required to acquire a top free-agent blue liner.
To put it briefly, the Toronto Maple Leafs will have difficulty acquiring a well-known defenseman. In the interim, the team needs a better goalie and most likely a center to play behind Tavares and Matthews. And there’s the Mitch Marner conundrum.
PuckPedia estimates that the Leafs have just under $20 million in cap space available. With the quantity of RFAs and required upgrades, that’s not a lot of wiggle room. But there’s also a ton of dead weight to remove from the roster.
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