Tampa Bay Lightning: How Mitch Marner’s deal affects Brayden Point

Mitch Marner has re-signed with the Toronto Maple Leafs. The deal stands at six years for $10.893M per year. That’s good news for the Leafs and bad news for the Tampa Bay Lightning and Brayden Point.

For Toronto Maple Leafs fans, the Mitch Marner deal is a relief. The superstar winger has returned with a new contract before the start of training camp. It goes even deeper, however, and I give credit to Steve Dangle for shedding light on this fact – the Leafs’ top seven forwards and number one defenseman Morgan Reilly are all locked up for at least the next three years. The deal, might, however, not be good for the Tampa Bay Lightning.

For the Leafs, though, their main core of Auston Matthews, John Tavares, William Nylander, and Marner are locked-up for the next five seasons. If you dive deeper into the Marner contract, it’s slightly more appealing than it might appear at first glance.

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The base salary is $700,000 for the first two seasons and $750,000 for the last four seasons. The contract is primarily made up of signing bonuses, with the last three seasons of his deal having $7.25 million in bonuses.

It’s a front-loaded deal, giving the Leafs the option to pay Marner’s bonuses quickly and, if it comes down to it, making Marner a more appealing player to trade for in other teams’ eyes. Ultimately, they’re paying him elite-level money to play alongside an elite center in either Tavares or Matthews, to put up 90+ points every year.

If he does not meet those expectations, they front-loaded his contract and made it mostly signing bonus-laden, making the contract movable and not too expensive for another team to take. The Marner signing stretches further out than just Toronto, though. It affects the entire market of unsigned RFAs.

That means that it affects Tampa’s negotiations with Brayden Point, Vancouver’s negotiations with Brock Boeser, Winnipeg’s negotiations with Kyle Connor and Patrick Laine, Calgary’s negotiations with Matthew Tkachuk, and Philadelphia’s negotiations with Travis Konecny.

However, I will focus only on the Lightning today. Then for the next few days, I’ll look at all the other teams with holdouts.