Report: Lightning, Point 'far apart' in contract negotiations

The Toronto Maple Leafs had to fork over a lot of money to get Mitch Marner re-signed, but the club was able to lock him up with plenty of time to spare before the regular season.

The Tampa Bay Lightning, on the other hand, seem to be approaching their negotiations with restricted free agent Brayden Point in a much different manner at this time.

And unsurprisingly, things don’t seem to be going quite as smooth after the Bolts by all intents and purposes lowballed the centre with their latest reported offer.

I know Tampa Bay may have gotten used to inking players to extremely team-friendly deals after both Patrick Maroon and Kevin Shattenkirk joined the club on the cheap, but this an almost laughable offer if true.

Point and Marner have followed pretty similar career trajectories. Both posted 60-plus-point seasons two years ago before erupting for over 90 points each in 2018-19. To put it into context, the annual average value of this latest reported offer to the Lightning forward would earn him a little more than half of what Marner is making.

I know the term is different, but that’s still quite the discrepancy.

According to CapFriendly, Tampa Bay has just under $8.5 million in projected cap space, and it’s reasonable to expect that Point will gobble up most, if not all, of that when all is said and done.

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