What the Leafs can learn from the Florida Panthers: Bill Zito’s cap management goes beyond tax benefits

There’s an unfortunate maxim that permeates through modern sports coverage: in the absence of real analysis, there can be a tendency to gravitate towards the unquantifiable. Throughout the spring and well into the early stages of the summer, the Florida Panthers’ success was reduced to the sum of benefiting from no state income tax. Critics and complainants surmised that the Panthers won consecutive Stanley Cups largely by playing in Florida, building a roster with unfair advantages under a hard cap, rather than winning out due to their talent, chemistry, structure, defensive commitment, and chance production.

This idea was further pronounced when the Panthers pulled off the seemingly impossible, retaining Sam Bennett, Brad Marchand and Aaron Ekblad on long-term pacts, while signing Jeff Petry to a $775,000 deal where he functions as an overqualified No. 6 defenceman. It was a dream offseason for the defending champions, a revolting prospect for 31 other teams.

If you continue to discount Panthers general manager Bill Zito, and his staff consisting of Brett Peterson, Gregory Campbell and Sunny Mehta, among others, it simply makes their job easier. Florida is cooking with a nucleus of 10 players that are under contract through the 2029-30 season. It enters the 2025-26 season as the prohibitive favourite to three-peat. Mehta and Peterson should be leading candidates for general manager roles, especially if the NHL continues to operate as a copycat league.

“I think it’s more that they look at their group and they love playing together,” Zito recently said to NHL.com. “They truly are a team, they like being part of it, and that they’re excited because they think, ‘Listen, we’re in a position where we can do pretty well. We have the talent. We have the guys. We know each other. We know what works.'”

There’s often been a pithy cry in this corner of the internet: how are the Maple Leafs supposed to compete with the Panthers, if the Panthers have an inherent tax benefit? This would become a more lucid argument, if the Leafs handled contract negotiations with deft touch. Perhaps it’s unfair to attribute decisions made by Kyle Dubas to the current management group, but considering that the Leafs effectively mismanaged Mitch Marner’s expiring contract, which became clear when Marner revealed that he was always willing to push his contract talks to the proverbial 11th hour, they haven’t exactly secured the benefit of the doubt.

Brad Treliving signed William Nylander to an eight-year extension worth $11.5 million, which is fair value for the player, while Auston Matthews is under contract through the 2027-28 season at a $13.25 million cap hit, which again, is fair value. All of this becomes obscured when you compare these deals to the Panthers’ cap sheet, where Aleksander Barkov and Sergei Bobrovsky (playing out the final year of his deal) are the only players who make $10 million. You could argue this stems from Florida’s tax benefit, but there is a real winning culture as Zito stated, and they’ve managed to find a cure to the Disease of More that Bill Simmons once popularized.