Making some sense out of the Maple Leafs salary cap

Photo by Kevin Sousa/NHLI via Getty ImagesOnly a few weeks ago a trade of someone off the Maple Leafs roster who played all of last season on the team seemed inevitable. There wasn’t enough cap space to fit in everyone, and even with some players lost to waivers, as seems inevitable, that wouldn’t make the remainder cost less. That hasn’t really changed, not even with John Tavares injured for a few weeks.

To illustrate this, instead of just recreating the CapFriendly page, which shows the Leafs over the cap by a significant amount on a projected roster, let’s look at it in a new way.

The salary cap is $82.5 million, and the Leafs have one little scrap of “dead money” from the rollover of…