New Matthews deal is the only outcome that made sense

The contract that will keep Auston Matthews in Toronto for the next five years may as well have been signed at the same time as William Nylander’s.

This was always going to be the outcome.

The days of elite young players taking a hometown discount and simultaneously signing for eight years — we can call this the Connor McDavid Special — are now officially over, and they were the day Nylander locked himself into a six-year deal that will pay him every penny of the $6.96-plus million he’s worth.

Young contributors just aren’t going to take the argument that they should be paid less during their RFA years, and they aren’t going to take the argument that they should maximize their contract as far as term goes. With the salary cap seemingly on an unceasing incline, why would you not give yourself as many opportunities as possible to cash in a higher paycheck? In fact, it seems to me that while Nylander represented a class-conscious market shift in an increasingly smart league in which teams are about three years away from realizing they shouldn’t give big money or term to guys over 27, Matthews is the real standard bearer now.

Here’s an elite talent who might have been able to wring a million or so extra dollars out of Kyle Dubas, but decided to take more or less what he’s worth — that is, if the bar is now McDavid’s foolish-for-him $12.5-million AAV, which it probably shouldn’t be — but over a much shorter timeframe.

This, essentially, allows Matthews to cash in on his approximate value now, give Toronto a few years where he’s worth more than his cap hit, then cash in again once the market resets.

The amazing thing is that it took this long, but one guy doing it on a team of superstars, and in fact withholding his services to maximize his payout, is what shifted hockey’s Overton window (Ovechkin window?) here. What was previously almost unthinkable, a player maxing out his cap hit on his second contract, is now in not only the theoretically possible, but has actually happened.

It used to be that you needed to be a Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, or Alex Ovechkin to even think about such a thing. And even then, Crosby and Malkin took something resembling hometown discounts on their second deals, even if they were still far more than the vast majority of higher-end young talents were getting.

Not that Matthews isn’t one of the best players in the league right now and today, but he didn’t even think of taking a hometown discount and frankly he shouldn’t have. The big argument you heard about Nylander, then Matthews — and next probably Mitch Marner, Patrik Laine, Matt Tkachuk, and Sebastian Aho — is that if they take all this money, they’re going to screw up their teams’ cap situations. And boy, if that happens, then they might not win the Cup and isn’t that the ultimate goal here fellas?

But that ignores the fact that owners in this league are going to try to extract as much excess value from their labor as possible, all while trying to move the goalposts on what hockey-related revenue to keep the cap from going up as much as it has. All this while GMs just take the extra money elite RFAs would have freed up with that hometown discount and use it to overpay guys like, oh, just to pick a couple names at random who probably don’t have much to do with Matthews’ situation, Patrick Marleau, Nikita Zaitsev, or Ron Hainsey.

The problem with this league is that young players have always taken the hit in favor of veterans. Guys who think vets “paid their dues” by taking crap deals for the first several years of their (rather limited) earning windows just perpetuate a problem in which worker is turned against worker for what has been a shrinking percentage of the HRR pie. But now that the revenue split is down to 50-50, owners are going to try to redefine what constitutes HRR in the first place so they can continue to leech off the talents of world-class athletes while contributing nothing themselves.

So yeah, Matthews, Nylander, Marner, Tkachuk, Laine, Aho, and everyone else: Go get your money as soon as you can. Because in this sport, your career earning potential could change dramatically either on your very next shift or during the next CBA dispute. You can’t let them take a cent from you, and don’t spare another thought for the cap implications.

Owners are paying you to put pucks in the net. They’re paying management to deal with the cap.

Ryan Lambert is a Yahoo Sports hockey columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.