A key piece of offseason business for the Maple Leafs is done.

The Leafs signed Matthew Knies, their emerging 22-year-old power forward, to a six-year contract on Sunday with an annual average value of $7.75 million.

The deal will keep Knies under team control until 2031, buying up his age 23-28 seasons.

It’s a significant, but well-earned, commitment to a player who has quickly established himself as one of the Leafs’ best and most important players. Crucially, the Leafs got a deal done before an offer sheet became a possibility on July 1.

Knies made a huge leap last season, his second in the NHL. He scored 29 goals and 58 points for the Leafs, playing 18:31 a night. He was stapled to Auston Matthews’ left wing on the No. 1 line and established himself as a central component of the team’s No. 1 power-play unit.

Knies scored five power-play goals and totalled 15 power-play points, and also emerged as a primary penalty killer. Only William Nylander scored more goals in the playoffs (six) than Knies (five).

He is the only player in Leafs history to post at least 29 goals and 180 hits in a single season. The only other players in the NHL to do so last season were Tom Wilson and Brady Tkachuk.

Knies will turn 23 in October.

It’s still unclear just how good he can become, whether his ceiling is something like last season or whether he can climb higher still into one of the league’s truly elite players.

What does this mean for the Leafs?

Knies’ new contract comes in almost right in line with the five-year, $7.7 million a season deal that J.J. Peterka signed with Utah earlier in the week, and isn’t far off the seven-year, $7 million a season contract Matt Boldy inked with with the Wild in 2023. (Back in March, we identified Boldy’s contract as the best possible comparable to Knies.)

With the cap set to rise aggressively over the next few years, Knies contract should be a bargain relatively quickly, as his $7.75 million cap hit will be closer to the equivalent of $5.5 million in today’s cap dollars by the final season of the deal. That, combined with his continued development, should pay off considerably for Toronto given they bought two years of unrestricted free agency with the signing.

Getting Knies signed before Tuesday was important as with such a thin free-agent class, the threat of an offer sheet was very real. And it’s plausible the AAV would have been north of $8.5 million on a shorter term in that scenario.

With John Tavares and Knies both signed, the Leafs now have $13.5 million in cap space available with nine forwards, seven defensemen and two goaltenders signed. Toronto’s two remaining RFAs of note are Pontus Holmberg and Nick Robertson, who should both be able to be signed for under $1 million each.

— James Mirtle

(Photo: Kim Klement Neitzel / Imagn Images)