Ahead of the 2025 NHL Draft, General Manager Brad Treliving discussed Mitch Marner testing UFA, progress on contracts for John Tavares and Matthew Knies, the opportunity afforded by the available cap space, and the activity in the trade market.
You mentioned “changing the team’s DNA” the last time you spoke. Can you describe what that might look like, starting with the draft through to free agency and the rest of the summer?
Treliving: I heard that kind of got some play. That was the gotcha.
I said at the same time that it is not about airlifting in 20 new bodies. You have to continue to evolve. It is a mindset as much as anything. That is what we will continue to do.
Obviously, there will be roster change. There is every year. You need everything to be successful — you need skill, you need talent, but ultimately, it is that competitiveness. We’ve seen it here in the last month or in the last few weeks in the remainder of the playoffs. We see it every spring and every playoff. We want to continue to build that.
Where do things stand with Mitch Marner?
Treliving: I wouldn’t say there is a whole lot of change right now. We are approaching free agency. We have had communication. I would describe it — unless there is a significant change — that I anticipate he will hit the market. We will see where things go.
What are the chances you could get something for his rights before July 1?
Treliving: We will see how everything goes.
Do you expect to meet with Marner’s camp on July 1?
Treliving: We have had communications on a regular basis. We will see how everything plays out.
Are you confident you can get John Tavares and/or Matthew Knies done before Tuesday?
Treliving: With John, there is a deadline, right? We have had a lot of communication.
You are always a bit hesitant to frame it. You are trying to give as much information as you can. It has been positive.
As we said at the end of the year, we have both expressed a shared outcome. John wants to stay. We want to keep John. Like any contract, there are just two little stumbling blocks: term and money. Once you get by those, usually, things flow pretty quick!
We are moving, hopefully, in a direction to bring it to a closure. My hope, until proven otherwise, is that we will have a good outcome there.
Matthew is the same thing. There is lots of communication. There is not the same deadline, necessarily, but it goes without saying that Matthew is going to make more than he is making now on his next contract. You always want to protect yourself moving into the summer past July 1. We want to make sure we are protected.
I am sure the next question is whether there will be an offer sheet. That is not anything you can operate in fear of, but you have to do proper business. We are very hopeful that it will get to a good conclusion. When that is, time will tell.
What kind of a challenge does it present when you are heading into free agency and a core piece is set to hit the open market?
Treliving: You are trying to make your team better, and the potential is to lose a really good player. There are lots of challenges. We try to look at it as viewing those as opportunities as well. That is the job.
Everybody is focused on July 1st, and I get it. We don’t play on July 2nd. You use the time, starting on July 1st, to try to make your team better. That may come on July 1st. It may come on August 1st or September 1st. You are not sure.
We continue to work the market. Certainly, there are some challenges. It is a really good player.
I said this before, too. There is not a Mitch Marner tree you go to and just replace him. If that indeed happens, we will continue to look at ways to help ourselves.
What is your number-one priority in free agency?
Treliving: We will see when we get there. You have to see what is available in free agency. I think it probably dovetails a little bit with Mitch going. If Mitch is going, there is everything that he does, as well as trying to get better.
We will look at all positions.
What kind of opportunities does it present when a player like Marner is leaving the organization?
Treliving: I don’t know if it is an opportunity when he is leaving. There is cap space available. That leads us to how we are going to use that. Those are the things we have to look at.
Regarding cap space, GM Don Waddell said that in his opinion, just because the cap is going up, a player who was worth $3 million last season is not automatically worth $4 million. How do you push back against players in contract negotiations who feel that, because there is more space, they are worth more?
Treliving: That is the rub, right? With the cap going up, each player looks at how it affects them and their value.
It is always a puzzle. As much as we can say there is cap space available, there is going to be more cap space allotted to Matthew Knies next year — whatever that number is — than he had this year. It is allocating the dollars.
The answer to your question is really the essence of that negotiation and the push and the pull. You are trying to find the value that you think fits for the certain player, and it has to work from the player’s side, too.
As you review the season six weeks later, do you view it any differently than your team was the only one to push Florida to seven games?
Treliving: I don’t necessarily look at the games. The best team won. I think that was very clear. The best team won the Stanley Cup this year.
There were a lot of good things that we did. You see it for every team that loses. Dallas made it to their third straight Conference final, and when you lose, you feel like you missed the playoffs for the last five years. The disappointment and the negativity when you finish sometimes increase the further you go. You have to keep everything in perspective.
There were a lot of good things, but whether we lost in five, six, or seven — I don’t think you can get hung up on the number. The best team won the Cup, and now we have to find ways to make ourselves better.
You inherited a lot of the contracts, but with a lot of the no-trade and no-movement clauses, does the organization need to look at how easily it hands those out?
Treliving: I don’t know. I think that is a very general statement. I am not here to throw a rock. It is easy to look back in hindsight when the contracts are getting done. Sometimes, those are mechanisms to get a contract done.
You certainly always like to have as much flexibility with a contract as possible. Those are never viewed as something that you just give out for the sake of giving out, but it is easier to look back in retrospect than it is to really dig into why whatever trade protection was given was given.
How much does experience weigh into your priorities for free agency? A lot of older players really excelled in the playoffs this year.
Treliving: You always have to balance everything — experience, youth. The league is getting younger and younger. I don’t think it is a coincidence that a lot of the time, on the team you see finishing up at the end, you don’t see a lot of rookies on those teams. It does play a factor.
It is all balance, too. There are a lot of things young players can bring to a lineup. You are seeing young players play earlier now than you did years ago, with the energy and everything that they bring.
I don’t think you can just blanket it and say, “Okay, you need a bunch of greybeards.” It is all balance. Ultimately, it is like any position. You look at what is available, what fits, and what the cost is. Certainly, experience plays a role in it.
You can never have too much experience, but you have to balance it as well.
What are the chances you move up in the draft? How challenging is a decentralized draft in terms of making trades?
Treliving: We have had a little bit of experience (during Covid). It doesn’t seem that long ago, but sometimes, it does seem a long time ago.
You are missing the personal contact where you can get up, walk down the table, and talk to one of the guys. That is probably a little bit of a challenge, but we have phones. I don’t anticipate it being a problem.
The advantage is a little bit of the timing, more than anything else. You are usually in the draft city on Friday-Saturday, and then you have to travel back. Everything is jammed up. You have free agency right behind it.
But I love the draft when you have everybody in one location, but within the room, you are not confined to that table, or you really can’t talk to anybody. You have the ability to move around and speak to people more easily than you would in the normal setting.
As far as moving up at #64, we will see. The guys are well-positioned here. We are looking at move-down scenarios potentially more than move-up. But you just see how it all unfolds.
How much is your phone ringing versus a normal year?
Treliving: Just normal conversations. We have seen all of the transactions that have taken place. I would call it normal in terms of the conversation. There is lots of it going on.
Would you be willing to move out prospects and picks in the trade scenarios? How open to that are you?
Treliving: Yeah. As a general comment, I would say we are open to everything, but again, it has to make sense. We are not just going to shuffle out a prospect for the sake of it. But we are looking at all sorts of scenarios. At the end of the day, it has to fit from a roster standpoint, a dollar standpoint, and a value standpoint.
You have some RFAs other than Matthew Knies. Can we expect to see Pontus Holmberg and Nick Robertson receive qualifying offers? Is it just routine business for you?
Treliving: We will get to that. With any of our free agents, we have talked to them. For some of them — and this is nothing against the other players — there has been more [discussion]. With the UFA guys and the timeline, you are probably spending more time there. But we certainly have been engaged with any of the guys who need contracts.
Does that include Steven Lorentz and Max Pacioretty?
Treliving: Yep. Everybody who is up we’ve talked to and have a feeling on whether they are going to come back or not come back. With those are we are engaged with, we have a little bit of sense of where they are at.
Is your sense that Pacioretty wants to keep playing hockey?
Treliving: I think so. I do. I believe that he does. I don’t want to speak for him, but I have talked with Allan [Walsh], and certainly, after him getting away for a bit, he feels that he wants to keep going.
Do you still see a fit for Nick Robertson in Toronto?
Treliving: Yeah, Nick is a good player. Again, it is June. The puzzle has to come into place, but I think Nick is a good player. He is still a young player who is an evolving player. But he has a skill set, and he shoots it in the net. That is a good skill set to have.
Again, we will see how it all plays out. We are in the early days here, but Nick is a great kid who possesses a real good skill set.
