Joined: Jul. 2018
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I think this contract is hard to evaluate because it's different then what has been done recently, but it's similar to used to be the norm for RFA superstars coming off their ELCs.
Malkin, Stamkos, Crosby, Toews, Kane, Tavares, Perry and Getzlaf all signed 5 (6 in Tavares case) year deals for between about 10.5% of the cap and 17% of the cap (except Tavares at 8.55%).
Matthews first year will be something around 14% which puts him quite a bit lower than Crosby at 17% or Malkin at 15.34%, but higher than pretty much everyone else in that group. All of those contracts turned out to be steals by the end of them. In the case of Crosby, Malkin, Kane, Stamkos, their 3rd contracts also look like steals, while Getzlaf and Toews seem to at least be fair, and Perry's being the most regrettable. Tavares is too early to tell if they have gotten enough good out of the early returns to say it was a good deal.
There are pros and cons to a 5 year deal, but I don't think it's as simple as saying he's a UFA at the end therefore it's bad.
The biggest risk of a 5 year deal is that he may walk away after 5 years. That's a risk, that's 3 less years of a player (under the assumption he would walk away at the end of 8 too.)
However, if you need to step up and sign a player as a UFA as 26 year old UFA is less likely to create a lot of regret than a 29 year old one, especially if you have to go max term.
Without thinking about the numbers, I would think that signing Matthews for his 5 year number now, then 8, will give you better overall value per dollar spent against the cap then if they end up in a situation where he signs 8 then another 8.
Personally, I've never really understood why this changed. Back when you could sign players for as long as you wanted, RFAs typically got 5-6 years. When they made the max term 8, why did longer on RFAs become the norm?
I think another thing that will make it difficult to evaluate is that the league is going through a shift that started a few years ago. GMs started to become less willing to hand out longer terms with big money to older UFAs. Since this is a cap league, this meant that those cap dollars that were no longer being spent elsewhere, pretty much just flowed to a different group, and that group was younger players.
Essentially players were put in this situation where they were drafted, go horribly underpaid for 3 years, then got a contract they had to fight for, so they could just get badly underpaid for 6-8 years, then had to strike it rick as a UFA and get massively overpaid to compensate them for the years of being underpaid. So if GMs just decide to stop overpaying UFAs, or doing so at a lesser amount, then RFAs are going fight to get more fairly paid while they are in their prime.
Strategically, it makes sense to pay the most during the years a player will be most productive. So in that vein, how good or bad this deal is will depend on two things. Do the Leafs make good use of the shorter term cap savings? Do they make the right decisions when the contract nears it's end?
If Leafs Management is smart, keeps a competitive roster together, uses the space, and makes sure there aren't bad or dead cap money on there when Matthews comes up, it puts them in a position to make this a good deal. If they mismanage things, then longer term would have been better.
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