Maple Leafs extend Jake McCabe: Have they committed to too many older defencemen?

The Toronto Maple Leafs sent first- and second-round picks to Chicago at the 2023 trade deadline for Jake McCabe (and Sam Lafferty).

A big part of the trade’s appeal: McCabe would come at half price — just $2 million in cap dollars — for two additional seasons.

That deal will expire at the end of this season.

Replacing it: A five-year contract extension with a $4.51 million cap hit that establishes the 31-year-old as part of the team’s core moving forward.

The Leafs announced the new deal on Monday morning, two days after McCabe logged almost 25 minutes in an overtime loss in Boston.

Jake McSIGNED ✍️ pic.twitter.com/7qy7FMCoSD

— Toronto Maple Leafs (@MapleLeafs) October 28, 2024

McCabe has grown into an increasingly important piece on the Leafs’ back end. He’s averaging more than 21 minutes per game this season, which would be a career high. He’s a first-unit penalty killer and has teamed up recently with Chris Tanev on a matchup pair. He brings feistiness, swagger and leadership.

He can also play both the left and right sides and showed some newfound offensive ability last season (eight goals).

The Leafs looked ahead to next summer and wondered how they would replace McCabe were he to exit as an unrestricted free agent. Extending the term of the deal to five years brought the cap hit down from $5 million-plus, not unlike the Tanev contract from this past summer (six years, $4.5 million cap hit).

In fact, the Tanev contract was a direct comparable in negotiations.

The Leafs are now tentatively committed to a top four of McCabe, Tanev, Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Morgan Rielly for at least the next three seasons beyond this one (after which Ekman-Larsson’s deal will expire).

And to me, that’s the biggest question: Have the Leafs committed themselves to too many older defencemen? And is what they’ve ended up with enough to help end a decades-long Stanley Cup drought?

McCabe will be 32 next fall when the new deal begins. Tanev will be 36 (come December 2025), Ekman-Larsson will be 34 and Rielly will be 31 going on 32.

Come the 2027-28 season, Year 3 of the McCabe deal, McCabe will be 34, Tanev will be 38, Ekman-Larsson will be 36 and Rielly will be 33.

Combined, the four defencemen will be eating about $20 million on the cap.

How good is that top four today even? How good will it be a year from now? And a year after that?

In extending McCabe, the Leafs are betting it’s enough not just for this season but well beyond that. They are betting on McCabe, Tanev and Ekman-Larsson especially, the oldest three, to continue to perform like top-four defencemen while also remaining healthy as they inch further and further into their 30s.

Decline can come quickly for defenders in that age bracket, as the Leafs saw firsthand with TJ Brodie (age 33 at the time) last season.

The Leafs bet on McCabe (after signing Tanev and Ekman-Larsson last summer) before even seeing whether this top four was good enough this season, both in terms of health and performance.

And that, to me, feels a little dicey and a little rushed.

Through nine games this season, the Leafs rank 27th in expected goals against per 60 minutes at five-on-five. That’s not to say the defence — the top of the defence, in particular — has performed poorly, but it has not been a runaway success either so far. (The penalty kill has certainly improved.)

Head coach Craig Berube has already shuffled the top two pairs, flipping McCabe onto the right side with Tanev.

Wait for the season to end, the Leafs might argue, and McCabe might just flee for more dollars elsewhere. And then who would they replace him with? Aaron Ekblad is due to be a free agent. He’d cost a whole lot more (more years, more dollars) were he to leave Florida. Ryan Lindgren, Vladislav Gavrikov, Jakob Chychrun, Jeff Petry, David Savard — the free-agent class of 2025 isn’t exactly booming with studs, let alone young studs.

That’s fair enough.

Yet I find the whole who-do-we-replace-him-with-if-he-leaves rationale a little flimsy, especially when it means committing to another older defenceman.

Just because you can’t foresee a solution today doesn’t mean one won’t present itself down the line, especially with some creativity.

Defencemen just like McCabe tend to become available annually at the trade deadline — like McCabe did, for that matter, in 2023. Acquiring said defenders does mean parting with quality assets, so that’s a strike in the favour of a deal like this.

So is the price point of free-agent defenders in McCabe’s ballpark. Brandon Montour and Brady Skjei each got pricey seven-year deals this past summer. Brett Pesce and Matt Roy got six years apiece at annual numbers higher than what McCabe got from the Leafs.

Still, could this deal not have waited until after the postseason? Until after, that is, the Leafs see whether this team can make a run after years of playoff failure, until after they see whether this top four on defence is enough?

The biggest priority for GM Brad Treliving after last season, his first in Toronto, was overhauling the defence. That process is basically done now. The end result is a top four of McCabe, Tanev, Rielly and Ekman-Larsson, with depth parts like Simon Benoit and Jani Hakanpää.

Is that enough? The Leafs are betting it is.

(Photo: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)