There are going to be A LOT of teams with internal caps, Buffalo, Arizona, Pittsburgh are 3 that we KNOW will have internal caps.
If there were a lot of heavily back-loaded contracts out there then maybe this would not be as bad for the Leafs, but there are not.
For instance, Arizona has a projected cap next year of 80 (but they have more space than that as they can LTIR Hossa), but their estimated salary expenditure is only 61M. They actually have lots of room before they hit their internal cap. Now, few teams are like that, but a large number of teams have salary expenditures that are 5 - 10M (or more) less than their cap (Chicago, LA, Vancouver, Anaheim, Vegas, Boston, Florida, STL, Dallas, Washington, Philly, Montreal, Detroit). A couple other teams are so far below any internal it won't really affect them much. If Buffalo, for instance, were to set an internal cap at 70M they are currently 22M below that. They only have 10 players under contract, but they have a number of ELCs coming up and they will be able to sign some cheap depth players. (and personally I think that if they set an internal cap of 70M the owner will be fine with them spending the additional 11.5M if, and only if, they then can sign a big name UFA (like Pietro or Hall).