SDPN Sports: Chris Johnston and Julian McKenzie on the William Nylander contract situation after Auston Matthews signed his four-year contract extension.
McKenzie: “Is William Nylander more resolute about being a Toronto Maple Leaf or being a $10 million player?”
Johnston: “You know, it’s tough though. I think they can be two different things, right?
I think the idea of wanting to be paid fairly when you have a track record of a certain level of success is fair and I guess you just get down to what is fair and what isn’t fair and maybe William Nylander is doing a longer extension than Auston Matthews. That wouldn’t surprise me.
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Ultimately in that case he’s looking at a landscape where the cap could shoot up a lot of money in that time. And so, when players are making those kind of calls, they have to imagine ‘what am I giving up potentially’ right?
This is going to be his biggest contract, I would think as an NHL player. Probably the biggest one he’ll sign. So it’s an important decision.
I don’t know that it has to be a certain number specifically but clearly where the talks started between the Leafs and Nylander there was a big gap there. I don’t think it’s been narrowed. Maybe now there’s a new way to frame it.
Now William Nylander knows A) What Auston Matthews is gonna make and B) That he’s locked in for the next five seasons.
I can’t really predict just because there hasn’t been any real momentum in those talks of late. But, you know, we still got almost a month ’til training camp opens. So there’s, there’s a lot of time I think to get that business done and I imagine the Leafs are going to give it the good old college try to get it done.
McKenzie: “I got to admit, I was starting to think that Matthews was going to enter the regular season without a new deal. It just seemed like this process was taking its sweet time. So I gotta admit I was wrong on that.
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But seeing that the Matthews thing got done, I have to think now that we’re going to see some kind of resolution when it comes to William Nylander before puck drops in October.