This is how it works. You go to CapFriendly, click on the Leafs page, scroll down — ignoring who they’ve set as the NHL-rostered players — and look at the cap space and then notice the roster size and fudge it around by some player or other and announce the number.
That is the precise, to the dollar, cap space the Leafs “have”. It’s math. Hard facts.
Except back when Kyle Dubas lied outright about not being up against the cap when they were, he started mentioning flexibility. That was the true part of what he said that day.