You're correct. His deadline is basically October, and not December. Otherwise the leafs can't afford his prorated contract (like Nylander), unless they were to get rid of Kadri or someone. That would never happen though.

you and poster are both incorrect.

To understand why we have to understand that the cap is not at a point in time. Cap hits are incurred daily and are accumulated over the course of the season. You have to be under the cap over the course of the season, not at a given point in time.

For the sake of this discussion, i am going to use the follow terms to help explain.

daily cap hit = the amount we all typically refer to as cap hit ex. $10M for nylander last year.

accumulated cap hit = the amount a team actually incurs against their cap. For calculation purposes they take the daily cap hit value divide it by the number of the days in the season and for every day the player is on the roster, the team accumulates that amount against their cap for the year. Over the course of the year that calculation that is done daily adds up to the accumulated cap it.



Now for the typical player, daily cap hit and accumulated cap hit are equal, so noone bothers differentiating, but for players signed mid-season it matters. Let's look at nylander.

Nylander's daily cap hit last year was $10.2MM. Everyone knows that number. What they dont know is the leafs only accumulate the daily amount for the period he was on the team. So at the end of last season, nylander's accumulated cap hit was $6.9MM, the exact same number as every other year of his contract. That's done on purpose to ensure accumulated cap hits arent manipulated by signing date. It's fair, and there's no penalty other than missing out on your player for the period they werent on their team.

Please take a look at the chart in the link below, and notice the difference on nylander between cap hit, and accumulated cap hit.

https://www.capfriendly.com/teams/mapleleafs/cap-tracker/2019


So back to marner. Assuming the leafs sign him for let's call it $80 MM of actual money. His accumulated cap hit in every single year will be $10MM.

If he signs in July his daily cap hit will be $10 MM, and the leafs will accumulate $10MM of cap hit over the full season

If he signs Dec 1, like Nylander, his daily cap hit will be around $14.7 MM, but his accumulated cap hit will still be $10MM, as he will only be on the team for ~67% of the season.

Okay, thanks for clearing that up. I thought how it worked (and how all the insiders said it does) was that the player gets the raised cap hit in the first year to make up for the lost salary while the rest of his cap hits are lowered. Honestly this is confusing but you made sense so thanks.