Maple Leafs' 2006-2007 Salary Commitments

I’ll be honest with you, the past week of free agent signings and trades interested me more than watching the Stanley Cup final. Imagine that - a week of refreshing TSN’s homepage, wondering what the Leafs were up to on the trade market trumped boosting a team I never follow during the regular season. Sorry, Edmonton. Your greatest achievement in sixteen years couldn’t compete with the news that the one and only Hal Gill had signed a long-term contract with Toronto. I mean, this was freaking Hal Gill! Seriously, I jumped out of my chair. I really did. Where’s the blue face paint?

Anyway, now that the dust has settled a bit, it’s possible to do an interim assessment of the team’s salary structure. With the Leafs’ major acquisitions - Andrew Raycroft, Hal Gill, and Pavel Kubina - now signed to contracts, most of the team is now in place for next season. So what’s left to spend?

Here are the payroll stats, taken from TSN’s website. Some of these figures may be incorrect - the reason for that is because TSN only reports salaries earned by the player in the current year, but not the overall cap hit, which is all anybody really cares about. (Like – why do they list McCabe’s salary as $7.15 million? Everybody wants to know what his contract means to the salary cap next season, not what he will earn in the calendar year.)

Unfortunately, no site I know about reports player contract lengths. So for the ones I could find the details for, I worked the calculator to figure out the cap hit. And the others that I couldn’t find - I had to use TSN’s numbers. (In other words, this is as good as I could do. If any figures are off, leave a comment with the correction. Why isn’t there a resource for this?)

Toronto 2006-07 Salary Commitments

Mats Sundin 6,333,333.00
Bryan McCabe 5,750,000.00
Pavel Kubina 5,000,000.00
Tomas Kaberle 4,250,000.00
Hal Gill 2,100,000.00
Andrew Raycroft 2,000,000.00
Darcy Tucker 1,596,000.00
Jeff O'Neill 1,500,000.00
Nik Antropov 1,007,000.00
Chad Kilger 900,000.00
Alexander Steen 720,000.00
Alex Ponikarovsky 725,000.00
Wade Belak 675,000.00
Staffan Kronwall 612,000.00
Mikael Tellqvist 589,000.00
J.S. Aubin 525,000.00
Ben Ondrus 475,000.00
John Pohl 450,000.00

Tie Domi buyout 1,250,000.00
Ed Belfour buyout 1,500,000.00

Current known obligations: $37,969,333.00

Unsigned RFA's, and their qualifying offers

Carlo Colaiacovo 901,740.00
Matt Stajan 845,880.00
Kyle Wellwood 689,700.00
Ian White 498,300.00
Jay Harrison 495,000.00

By these numbers, the Leafs are fast approaching the $44 million salary cap. Since John Ferguson has already said that he intends to keep a buffer of about 2 million dollars, he’s got maybe $4-6 million left in the kitty to sign a forward or two, depending on who will comprise the final roster to begin the season.

So who's left in the bargain bin?