Auston Matthews celebrates onstage with the Toronto Maple Leafs after being selected first overall in the 2016 NHL draft.Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
It took 27 days. Twenty-seven days that Auston Matthews didn't have a contract as a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs, which was long enough that it furrowed a few brows around the NHL.
Unusual? Well, a little bit. Although it's worth noting that the Edmonton Oilers made Nail Yakupov wait into late July, and the Florida Panthers didn't have Aaron Ekblad put ink to paper on his first contract until early September.
Typically when NHL teams win the lottery and pick first over all, the contract is a formality. There simply isn't much to negotiate. When the league first put in a salary cap in 2005, it also included very tight restrictions on what players could make in their first three years, and the first overall pick typically gets the max.
In recent years, the maximum base salary for draft picks has been $925,000 (all figures U.S.). Players can then earn additional bonuses of up to $2.85-million, with $2-million of those requiring the player have a truly outstanding season (i.e. finish in the top 10 in scoring in the league or top five in voting for a major award such as the Hart Trophy).
That's the contract Connor McDavid signed with the Oilers last summer. That's the one that Matthews signed with the Leafs on Thursday afternoon. It's the norm.
But the fact it took four weeks to get done led to plenty of speculation in the press and online that Leafs GM Lou Lamoriello was the one holding up the deal. Lamoriello has, in the past, been a stickler for giving out those entry-level bonuses. Most notably, defenceman Adam Larsson – Lamoriello's fourth overall pick with the New Jersey Devils five years ago – didn't get a single cent in performance bonuses on his first contract, an anomaly for a player drafted that high.
NHLers who played for Lamoriello in New Jersey have joked that he would prefer to pay all of them the same amount, if he could. It's part of an old-school philosophy focused on putting the team before the individual.
Performance bonuses – most of which are only given to the highest draft picks – are an obvious way of singling out the individual.
But both Lamoriello and Matthews's agent, Pat Brisson, strongly denied that the bonuses had caused any kind of holdup.
"The agreement took place within, I would say, 10 minutes of the first conversation that Pat Brisson and I had when we talked about Auston's contract," Lamoriello said. "This was never an issue at any point. … He's earned this."
"There were no issues at all getting it done with Lou and the Leafs," Brisson echoed.
Negotiating these contracts isn't anything new for Brisson. Including when Sidney Crosby entered the league in 2005, as the first No. 1 pick to sign under the NHL's 2005-12 collective agreement, Brisson's firm, Creative Artists Agency, has had six of the most recent 12 first overall picks. They have all signed almost identical deals.
This negotiation wasn't anything different.
"I don't know why people were panicking," said Brisson, who explained that discussions about the contract hadn't even started until last week. "We were in agreement right away."
"What was the rush?" Lamoriello added.
One thing the kerfuffle over Matthews's contract did was offer the Scottsdale, Ariz., teen an early glimpse of the mountains that can get made out of molehills when it comes to the Leafs. Brisson, however, had explained in detail to Matthews how straightforward his first contract would be right after he was drafted No. 1 at the end of last month.
The message: He didn't need to worry that it wouldn't get done.
"Honestly, he was more focused on the prospects camp and all of that," Brisson said.
What the mini-controversy also led to was Lamoriello rather bluntly explaining on a conference call after the deal was announced that he will not necessarily enforce all of the hardball stances he took with the Devils.
It's not his way or no way in Toronto, he said – not with head coach Mike Babcock and president Brendan Shanahan there to offer their opinions, too.
"I don't like the thought process sometimes [in the media] that because something was done somewhere else there are a lot of assumptions made [that it's happening here]," Lamoriello said. "This is maybe a good time to bring this forward: When Mike, Brendan and I got together, we said we would not be operating the New Jersey way or the Detroit way. We would be doing it the Toronto way."
And the Toronto way got Matthews's deal done in minutes.