Should Stamkos elect to explore being a UFA and his agent is clearly smart enough to realize that is in his best interest. The leafs will have a significant advantage in negotiating. This is where the financial muscle of the leafs will come in very handy, not only could they bring in a home town talent, but arguably the greatest free agent in modern hockey.
To do this Babcock would have to make a call and show him the Shanplan will work and he will be a national hero riding shotgun in the parade down Yonge street.
Let him know that we are a few years away from competing but a cup and development is our mantra now.
So how you may ask? Well as long as oil keeps dropping and the Canadian dollar drops more we are in luck. You see all players are paid in USD and if the Leafs were to seriously front load a 8 year deal with Steven, he would benefit by switching those dollars to CAD upon the signing bonus. No team would dare top a first year signing bonus of $25,000,000usd and a second year of $10,000,000. With an exchange rate as of today and bound to get worse by UFA day he could earn upwards of 35-38 million on the day of signing. This is a lot of money to abandon.
A contract say 8 years at AAV of 10 million so 80 millionusd front loaded would take him way over the 100 million dollar mark Canadian. As the value of CAD drops , it will not drop forever and is bound to rebound in 2020 when the frontload is done.
This financial advantage is crucial to signing him for less than the max contract, which gives Stamkos more than he hoped for, and a smaller cap hit for Toronto to build around.
This will be an interesting year to see what happens both in Stammerland and Leafland.
I for one would love to see Stamkos dawn the blue and white and bring home a cup to Toronto.
If he hits the open market, your figures are too low. Sad but true.
"Don", not "dawn." "I... would love to see Stamkos DON the blue and white..."
So the Leafs cannot offer him an 8 year deal. And as a UFA, he is getting more than $10m/season. I think they have an advantage if he goes UFA.
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Interesting.....but also impossible.Per CBA, a single players aggregate annual salary(salary bonus) cannot account for more than 20% of the teams cap hit for any given year
Meaning $14M is the max they can be paid if we assume an approx. $70M cap