The Toronto Maple Leafs might be able to make the salary cap situation work enough to keep their biggest names together, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll sign Mitch Marner without headaches.
The ink on Auston Matthews’ daunting five-year extension barely dried before Marner’s agent Darren Ferris ratcheted up the drama.
In a Tuesday column for the Toronto Star, Dave Feschuk reported that Ferris claimed the Maple Leafs have been “trying to lowball” Marner, and described Matthews’ contract as not being a “team-friendly discount.”
Things blew up to such a point that Ferris went on two Toronto morning radio shows (TSN’s First Up 1050 and “The Jeff Blair Show” on Sportsnet 590) to try to put out the fires related to those comments.
In the process, Ferris then made a clarification on his clarification to Feschuk, ultimately stating that while Ferris made comments about the Maple Leafs lowballing Marner on Tuesday, those comments were related to alleged lowball offers from the summer.
*Phew*
After making eyebrow-raising comments, Ferris tried to spin things with the normal boilerplate comments you’d usually expect.
” ...the discussions have been going in the right direction, and Mitch will be a Leaf for a long time, and I’m sure that everything will work out,” Ferris said on “The Jeff Blair Show.”
Of course, to many, the damage has been done -- at least in terms of acting as if this is “business as usual.”
And, again, Ferris is doing his best to provide damage control after a day’s worth of frightening quotes about Marner wanting to get as close to Matthews’ $11.63 million cap hit as possible. Chris Nicholls transcribed radio interviews where TSN’s Darren Dreger stated that Marner’s camp reportedly believes he shouldn’t get “a penny” less than Matthews, and TSN’s Bob McKenzie seemed to make similar comments.
It’s difficult to shake the feeling that the people around Marner keep making things a little awkward, if not worse.
Back in December, Marner’s father Paul vented to The Athletic’s Jonas Siegel (sub required) about a perceived lack of interest in the winger possibly becoming the Maple Leafs’ next captain.
“I’ll just be honest with you,” Paul Marner said. “It drives our family nuts when we hear you guys all talk about who should be the captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Mitch never hardly gets any consideration. It’s because he’s like this happy-go-lucky little kid. But he championed the London Knights to the Memorial Cup with that same happy (personality). I watched a guy like Doug Gilmour who had a lot of joy on and off the ice but was a real competitor.
“And that’s Mitch.”
It’s enough to make your head spin, but Marner and the Maple Leafs did their best not to pour extra gas on the fire when asked about the process on Wednesday.
“That’s why you hire an agent, let him talk to Kyle (Dubas),” Marner said, according to Jonas Siegel.
“ ... A deal’s going to get done eventually.”
Maple Leafs head coach Mike Babcock echoed those thoughts. Sportsnet’s Chris Johnston reports that Babcock said “Mitch is gonna be ... Mitch is a lifetime Leaf.” So the messages seem to be aligned on-the-record, at least one day after things spiraled out of control.
(Or at least until Marner demanded that Ferris clean things up? We may or may not find that out once the smoke clears.)
Either way, if the goal of pushing contract extension negotiations to after the season was to “not be a distraction,” then Marner’s reps have failed in a big way.
Totally not a distraction for Marner, today. Only a game day where the only thing he’s asked about is the contract.
— Bryan Hayes (@HayesTSN) February 6, 2019
However, if the true objective is to get as much money as possible -- well, we’ll just have to wait and see.
And grab some popcorn.
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James O’Brien is a writer for Pro Hockey Talk on NBC Sports. Drop him a line at phtblog@nbcsports.com or follow him on Twitter @cyclelikesedins.