TORONTO — The directive from William Nylander as negotiations got started with the Toronto Maple Leafs on an extension entering last summer was pretty simple: prioritize an eight-year contract that would allow him to extend his stay with the organization for the maximum time allowable under the NHL’s collective-bargaining agreement.
“This is home,” he said Monday after putting pen to paper on a contract that was nearly seven months in the making.
Now, Nylander didn’t do the team any favors while securing a $92 million, eight-year deal that is now the largest in total value handed out in Leafs history.
And why should he have?
As an elite talent with prime years still ahead of him who had the ability to walk out the door on July 1, he and his camp were in possession of all the leverage from the outset. They could take a hard stance in negotiations with a high degree of confidence that he’d be able to fetch something north of $11 million on the free-agent market this summer.
Plus, there was the fact that his last contract negotiation went anything but smoothly.
Nylander essentially sacrificed a third of the 2018-19 season due to a bitter round of talks with former general manager Kyle Dubas that ended with him signing a six-year deal carrying an average annual value a shade under $7 million — a contract that proved to be far more team-friendly than those signed by peers Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner in the 20 months that followed.
Giggling with teammates, honing his craft, repping a local Italian joint and shrugging off any pressure: if the Maple Leafs can get eight more years of the William Nylander who showed up to work on Monday everyone will be happy.
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— Joshua Kloke (@joshuakloke) January 8, 2024
By the time last offseason arrived, Nylander could point to a resume that had seen him boost his goal, assist and point totals in two successive regular seasons while producing at a level commensurate with (or better than) his higher-paid teammates across the previous three or four playoff campaigns, particularly when measured by goals or points per hour in the most important games the Leafs played.
Still, when new general manager Brad Treliving and Nylander’s agent, Lewis Gross of Sports Professional Management Inc., met in Nashville to discuss their respective positions during the June draft, there was a sizable gap between how the sides saw the world when it came to Nylander’s next contract.
The Leafs were eyeing a deal in the 8s — something in the range of the eight-year, $8.5 million AAV contract Filip Forsberg signed with the Predators in 2022. Given the similar levels of production in Forsberg’s platform season and Nylander’s 2022-23 campaign, it was not an unreasonable comparison to draw at the time. But the Nylander camp pegged his value at being in the NHL’s upper-most tax bracket and much closer to the deal he ultimately ended up signing.
With the gap so wide and Treliving being thrown head-first into free agency after replacing Dubas, not to mention a negotiation with Matthews on an extension that wasn’t wrapped up until late August, the Nylander talks went quiet over the summer. That was the only period where the 27-year-old winger experienced some doubts about whether he’d get the chance to be a lifetime Leaf.
“You have no clue what’s going on,” Nylander said. “In the summer, I didn’t know what was happening with the new management, what their thoughts were.”
Any concerns were eased by the time he returned to Toronto for training camp.
That offered the opportunity for face-to-face conversations and the chance for both sides to reinforce a shared objective: finding a way for Nylander to stay with the team he’d been picked by at No. 8 in the 2014 draft while allowing the Leafs to hang on to a core member of their franchise well into his 30s.
On the opening day of training camp, Treliving told reporters it was a “priority” to get Nylander signed. By the time the calendar had flipped to January, it was an imperative for the organization.
Remember that there was a degree of risk from both sides by entering the season with no extension in place. For Nylander, there was the possibility of injury, underperformance or simply a cold run of shooting luck weakening his bargaining position.
For the Leafs … well, it’s basically exactly what we’ve seen play out over the past three months.
Nylander has taken his game into the stratosphere. By far the team’s most consistent performer with points in 33 of 37 games played this season entering a Tuesday matchup with San Jose, Nylander found himself on pace for 47 goals and 120 points when signing his new contract.
“I feel like that’s been my goal my entire life, to be a top player in the league. That’s how I feel I’m playing. That’s where I want to be at.”
How William Nylander mastered his contract year for the Maple Leafs: https://t.co/BnguxwvXp2
— Jonas Siegel (@jonassiegel) January 8, 2024
That helps explain why he found himself securing an $11.5 million AAV surpassed by only four NHL players under contract for next season: Matthews ($13.25 million), the Colorado Avalanche’s Nathan MacKinnon ($12.6 million), the Edmonton Oilers’ Connor McDavid ($12.5 million) and the New York Rangers’ Artemi Panarin ($11.6 million).
Nylander may not have favorable overall comparables to any of those players — or even some below them, like Boston’s David Pastrnak at $11.25 million — but his case certainly wasn’t hurt by the confirmation from NHL commissioner Gary Bettman at last month’s Board of Governors meeting that next year’s salary cap will take a significant jump for the first time since the pandemic, to $87.675 million.
That gave his agent the chance to hone in on the percentage of the 2024-25 salary cap he’d be taking up when making comparisons to other players. The 13.12 percent of cap Nylander’s deal ultimately landed at is actually behind where Panarin (14.29 percent), Pastrnak (13.64 percent) and even Marner (13.38 percent) were when they signed their current contracts.
Still, the Leafs had to stretch to the far reaches of their comfort zone before making Nylander one of the NHL’s highest-paid players. They ultimately determined there was no adequate way to repay his talent and production in a league where very few game-breakers make it to free agency, especially since the organization lacks the kind of assets needed to pull off a blockbuster trade.
Not only did they give Nylander a full no-movement clause and the big AAV, but they also agreed to limit his salary to just $1 million in Years 3, 4, 7 and 8 of the extension while jacking up the signing bonus payments — shielding him from the financial risk of a lockout when the current CBA expires in September 2026 and making the possibility of a late-stage buyout much less likely.
“Listen, it’s a big contract. It’s a lot of money,” said Treliving. “I don’t know if there was ever an ‘ah ha’ moment (in negotiations). You arm-wrestle. You go through it. But I don’t think there was ever a time where we felt we weren’t going to get to the finish line.”
They ended up making a massive commitment to get it over the line.
William Nylander has turned into a superstar. He got a big extension.
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— The Athletic NHL (@TheAthleticNHL) January 8, 2024
Before doing so, they’d at least had the chance to see Nylander play more than 600 games in a Leafs sweater and gained additional comfort after watching him follow a strong season in 2022-23 with an even bigger step in the first half of 2023-24.
As for Nylander, this ended exactly how he hoped it would. He tried to keep the daily flow of information to a minimum once the season started going and trusted his agent and Leafs management to work through the negotiations.
By the time he signed on the dotted line Monday morning, the realization dawned on him that it offered a path to spending his entire NHL career in Toronto.
“That was one of the things you’re thinking about going through the process. Eight years,” said Nylander. “I want to achieve something special and at that point, that would be the ultimate dream.”
(Top photo: Claus Andersen / Getty Images)
