This article is presented by bet365!
Toronto Maple Leafs forward Connor Dewar has elected to test salary arbitration, the NHLPA announced Friday. Dewar is one of 14 players who will go to arbitration this summer.
Per @NHLPA, 14 players elect salary arbitration. The club-elected deadline is tomorrow. Hearing are July 20-Aug 4 pic.twitter.com/0273XsrGWo
— Elliotte Friedman (@FriedgeHNIC) July 5, 2024
What this means is now the Leafs maintain the exclusive negotiating rights with Dewar and no other team is allowed to file an offer sheet. There will also be a hard deadline given for both sides to negotiate a new deal before the hearing date is announced later this summer.
This marks the second straight offseason that the Leafs have an RFA file for salary arbitration as they experienced this with Ilya Samsonov a year ago. Both sides were unable to negotiate a deal before the hearing date and the meeting resulted in him signing a one-year contract with an AAV of $3.55 million. Had Timothy Liljegren not re-signed last week, he would have also been eligible for arbitration so only having to focus on Dewar makes this process a lot easier for Toronto to manage.
Should the Leafs get to the same point with Dewar and he is awarded a settlement, it opens up a second buyout window that opens three days after the hearing and lasts 48 hours. According to PuckPedia, only players with cap hits greater than $4 million and on their roster at the previous trade deadline are eligible to be bought out. That means the ones that fit this description are the core five, and it’s hard to envision any of them being bought out by the Leafs so it won’t be as useful as it was last summer.
All of which is to say that the Leafs are going to have to shed some salary in the coming weeks if they wish to get an extension done with Dewar before the arbitration date. That means keep an eye on players such as Conor Timmins, David Kampf, and Calle Jarnkrok as any one of these three players could be on the move to free up some space. Alternatively, if Jani Hakanpaa’s contract is made official and he still needs time to recover from his knee injury he could be placed on LTIR to open up $1.5 million for a bit of temporary wiggle room.
AFP Analytics projects that Dewar will sign a two-year contract with an AAV of $1,423,221.62, marking a significant raise from the $800,000 AAV he has made over the past two seasons. It is certainly possible that the actual number comes in lower than that but is far from a guarantee.
Either way, the Leafs have some more clarity on Dewar’s contract situation and will soon get a window to get the extension done before the arbitration hearing.
