The Toronto Maple Leafs saw their season come to an end on Sunday night with another embarrassing Game 7 loss. With a lot of blame to go around in The Six, it’s sounding increasingly likely that pending free agent Mitch Marner will test the waters this summer.
If Marner does hit the open market, he’ll be one of the most sought-after players available. And the Flyers should at least take a run at him.
Sure, Marner isn’t the top-six center that the Flyers need. But he is a top-line winger who will likely thrive away from the Toronto media.
Philadelphia media is tough, too, you may think, but the Maple Leafs are the team in Toronto — and in Canada, to some extent. Think of it like how the Eagles are covered here as the top team, with the Flyers as a lowly fourth.
“But the Flyers already have too many wingers!” you exclaim.
Again, yes, but they don’t have anyone near the level of Marner.
Since joining the league in 2016, Marner has the eighth-most points across the entire NHL. He’s behind only Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Nathan MacKinnon, Nikita Kucherov, Artemi Panarin, David Pastrnak, and Sidney Crosby. That’s some pretty good company. His 1.13 points per game in his career ranks 10th in that span, with Kirill Kaprizov (319 games) and Auston Matthews joining the seven players named above.
Marner is coming off a career-high 102-point season. He’s been a point-per-game player in each of his last seven seasons since turning 21 with 611 points (180 goals, 431 assists) in 498 games in that span.
Travis Konecny has been the Flyers’ best player for several years now, and he just surpassed the 70-point mark this past season with 76 points in 82 games. Even what the biggest Konecny fans think of his ceiling doesn’t reach what Marner brings in a so-so season.
Marner, as one of the Flyers’ top-line wingers, would give the Flyers three legitimate weapons on the wing with him, Konecny, and Matvei Michkov. As an added bonus, Marner would completely transform the Flyers’ lifeless power play.
The one issue that we run into, though, is that those three usually prefer to play on the right side. We did see Konecny switch over to the left side to play with Sean Couturier and Michkov at times last season, and I’m sure he’d have no problem making that a more permanent gig if it means bringing in a top-10 winger in the league.
But we also must consider the Flyers’ other wingers, namely Owen Tippett and Tyson Foerster. Foerster has made the transition to left wing, but Tippett usually lines up on his natural right side.
Now’s probably a good time to mention that this thought experiment does rely on some trading and cap maneuvering. Adding a guy like Marner would require trading out one of those wingers — probably Tippett — in a package for a center, say, Marco Rossi?
It’s quite difficult to find a true first-line center in today’s NHL, so the Flyers could go the route of having elite wingers carrying the play with good-to-great centers. Jett Luchanko is pacing to be one of them, and the Flyers have three first-round picks that can be used to draft a few more — or trade for an established one as well.
As far as the salary cap is concerned, the Flyers are getting in a better and better position with each passing year. They have money coming off the books, and the salary cap is rising from $88 million to $95.5 million.
According to CapWages, the Flyers would have just under $34M in cap space with that $95.5M number next year. If you take their projected contracts for restricted free agents Cam York ($5.7M), Noah Cates ($4.6M), Tyson Foerster ($3.3M), and Jakob Pelletier ($1.1M), that still leaves the Flyers with $19.3M in cap space to use.
That’s plenty for Marner, who CapWages projects to land a seven-year contract just under $13M a year.
Looking forward, the Flyers don’t have a ton of money tied up in immovable contracts. Sean Couturier’s $7.75M is the closest they may have to that, but he could be LTIR’ed if it comes to that. It also wouldn’t stop them from going after an even bigger fish next summer.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, making a big splash this summer helps set the table for Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel to headline a stacked free agency class next offseason. Adding McDavid to the current team would undoubtedly take them up a few notches, but they could seal the deal by being able to sell him as the final piece to make Philadelphia a Hockey City again.
