The details and the numbers are only part of the story for the Maple Leafs. This contract is also a big change of pace for Toronto due to the way it’s structured, mostly because it is a team-friendly contract for one of its best players whose best days are still ahead of him.
Knies, the Maple Leafs’ first-round pick in 2021, is still only going to be 22 when the 2025-26 season begins and has significantly improved in each of his first two full seasons in the league. He had a breakout year in 2024-25 with 29 goals and 29 assists (58 total points) and has emerged as a big-time power-forward that also had a strong playoff showing (five goals).
Simply based on the player that he is right now, a $7.75M cap number is probably fair market value, especially with a rising salary cap that is rapidly increasing in the seasons ahead.
Just for comparisons sake, a $7.75M cap hit in 2025-26 would be the equivalent of a $7.1M cap hit in 2024-25 (based on that season’s $88M salary cap).
It’s going to be an even better value in 2026-27 when the salary cap climbs to $104M and in 2027-28 when it climbs to nearly $114M. By then, that contract will be the equivalent of a low $6M salary cap number this past season.
If Knies does not get any better than he is right now, it’s still a bargain. If he keeps getting better — which the Maple Leafs hope he will, and which is very possible — the contract becomes an even bigger bargain.
This is a big change for Toronto because over the past decade when it came time to re-signing its top players it was unable to get any of them to take less than their highest market value. Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander and John Tavares (on his original contract in Toronto) all took extreme market-value contracts and got every penny they possibly could. It helped create major salary-cap crunches, especially as that quartet continued to disappoint in the playoffs.
With Marner set to leave in free agency in the coming days, with Tavares re-signing at a team-friendly rate of his own ($4.3M per season over the next four years), and Knies taking this deal, the Maple Leafs are finally getting some bargains within their core group.
It might not seem like a big deal, but every little bit of savings can add up and create even more cap flexibility when it comes to building out the depth of a roster. The Maple Leafs’ depth has been just one of the many issues that have kept them from finding playoff success over the past decade.
Maybe with the Knies and Tavares contracts, they can finally work to meaningfully address that this season and in future seasons.
