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Ryan McCleary turned quite a few heads as an invite to the Leafs development camp post-draft. Now it's reported that the Leafs are signing him to an AHL contract. What if they hadn't, though? What if they'd signed him to an NHL deal making him Top 25 Under 25 Eligible?
He'd be a different guy, wouldn't he? That's my first thought on this. The type of contract a player gets says something about them. The trouble is, though, it's not a very reliable way to judge players. Sometimes players, particularly NCAA graduates who don't want to sign with the team that drafted them, are highly sought after and bidding wars erupt or teams trade for their rights to get a jump on the competition. Some recent examples:
- Cal Petersen
- Will Butcher
- Jimmy Vesey
- Adam Fox
- Cade Webber
Everyone wants to believe the latest name player on the market is going to be Fox, but they usually aren't. And the reasons why a player may get an NHL deal vs an AHL deal when the organizational expectation is he will play in the AHL are not just a measure of value.
First, let's understand the difference, because I know this causes confusion because it's all about corporate structures and you get no cool points for understanding that stuff.
MLSE is a corporation owned by Bell through two of its entities, Rogers, through one of its, and Kilmer Sports, the investment company owned by Larry Tannenbaum and the OMERS pension fund. Simple, right? MLSE owns the Leafs, the Marlies and a whole pile of other stuff. So saying a player under contract to the Marlies on an AHL deal is the same as playing for the Leafs is like saying [insert name of Raptors player here] is also on the Leafs.
Let's say some other NHL team who can't find any other soon-to-be 21-year-old defenders playing hockey wants McCleary, so they offer him an NHL deal. People will often say the Leafs have the right of first refusal. They don't really. They can join in the offering of the deal if they like, but if they don't have contract space or aren't very interested, they might just say, okay, guy, have fun on their AHL team instead of ours.
Contract room is often the issue. The number of contracts an NHL team can have is limited to 50 (with exemptions for teenaged juniors) so deciding when to put a player on the NHL payroll might be about that and not the player. But then there's the issue of status. T25 voters aren't the only people who might think an NHL contract says something about the player. The player likely does too, and a certain type of veteran AHLer an NHL contract is standard practice.
But for McCleary, no matter his contract, he's not a "junior to NHL, don't stop in the minors" guy. So even if the Leafs had been more bereft of signed players and had given him a deal that put him on our list, he was always going to the Marlies. And so are most of the rest of the eligibility list.
So again, would I rank him?
McCleary turns 21 in September, is 6'3" and listed at 182 lbs on his most recent junior roster. He shoots right and has a career WHL points rate of .51. Where does that rank? I looked at defenders in the WHL over the period of 21/22 to this past season, who have at least 150 games. McCleary has 185, and I wanted players with similar careers to his – not straight from the draft to the NHL types, but also not just junior lifers who get kicked out after their overage year. There's 65 in total in my comparison group.
Denton Mateychuk, who jumped into the AHL last year after the WHL playoffs, and will likely be in the NHL next year at least some of the time, leads this group with a rate of 1.13. McCleary, I'm fairly surprised to see is 15th. There's a few players ahead of him by points pace who are not under the control of an NHL team, and two of those have signed AHL deals. So he seems, based on his junior playing style and opportunities (points are about how the coach uses you, not just your ability) he's heading where you should expect him to go.
He's not actually undrafted either. He was taken by the Penguins in 2021 in the seventh round. His rights expired without them issuing him a contract, which is why he's available now to sign as a free agent.
I've only ever seen him play in that dev camp. And even if I was interested enough to watch his WHL games, they whisk them off their site seconds after the season is over. There is not a lot on Youtube, but this (the first few seconds of the video):
... is exactly the sort of thing he was doing at dev camp.
He's not fast or a great shot. He's not like Adam Fox really at all, in degree or type of play, but he does have the kinds of offensive instincts to know how to play a role that isn't just hug the blueline.
And then there's the other thing – the 6-3 thing. Well, and the 182 lbs thing. This is clearly a player who is not really, at almost 21, as physically developed as he'll be in a couple of years. And if you've got reach, you're hard to get around for opposing forwards, so he at least has that going for him too.
I'm not going to pretend I know this player, and frankly, I've seen him more than every single player the Leafs just drafted. I've seen him about as much as Noah Chadwick, who was unremarkable to bad at dev camp. And I have to figure out where to rank him as well. Not only that, the only difference I know of for sure between McCleary and Ben Danford is that one looked fun at dev camp and one got drafted in the first round.
Yes, I'd rank him. And as a little bit of a preview about how hard this list was for me to order below the top 10 or so, I'd say you could put him anywhere in that bottom 15 players and not be unable to support that with a real argument about his potential development. Somewhere lower down is likely a lot more reasonable, though. He is only one year younger than Matt Knies.
Maybe next year he'll be in the T25 for real.
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