On the Boston Bruins …
Jimmy Murphy: The Bruins interest in John Tavares could mean David Krejci‘s time in Boston could be coming to an end, even if they don’t sign Tavares.
On the San Jose Sharks and Joe Thornton …
Pierre LeBrun: Joe Thornton is expected to remain in San Jose. There is no rush to get his deal done and his contract could depend on who else they are able to add. The Sharks have the salary cap space to re-sign Thornton and sign John Tavares.
On the Toronto Maple Leafs …
Maple Leafs Hot Stove: Bob McKenzie was asked on TSN 1050 about the idea of John Tavares signing a one-year max deal with the Maple Leafs, then signing an eight-year contract extension partway through next season.
“It’s a case where anything could happen in one year. You could get injured and there is only so much of a contract that is insurable — even a longer term deal. You’ve got to be careful on what you think you’ve got in your back pocket.
I don’t even know… how does that work for the Leafs? I understand the concept of it. There is a lot of people who would say, “The league is going to step in,” and they’d have to have proof, obviously. What you’re effectively doing is signing a nine-year deal because you’ve got the one year and half way through the deal you can come back and say, “Let’s do an eight-year extension.” If you’re the Leafs, how do you do that? Presumably, it’s going to be a relatively big number. You can fudge it around a little bit. If you do the maximum — $15.9 million — for one year, that works out for you this year because the Leafs have some wiggle room this year, but they’re not going to have wiggle room after that. Then you can do an eight-year deal and play with the numbers and try to bring the AAV under 10, but it’s still going to be a huge number, whatever way you slice it. That eight-year deal for Tavares is not going to be $6 millon a year.
It’s still a pretty massive cap hit at a time when you’re going to have a pretty massive cap hit on Matthews and significant cap hits on Nylander and Marner, and even if you do a bridge deal with Nylander, presumably you’re going to have a… and I understand there are discretionary choices to be made. You could not keep this guy, or move that guy. But boy oh boy, that whole “nine year, one and eight” scenario… I don’t know if you can give him a seven year offer right now for the kind of money that he wants, so, I don’t know, you can get creative and I suspect that there is going to be every attempt to be creative by the Maple Leafs, but it still presents some enormous challenges.”