How rising NHL salary caps impact future Oilers contracts

With every signing that drops in the NHL, Leon Draisaitl’s $14 million contract continues to look better and better.

The eight-year extension has only been in effect for one season, and as it currently stands, he’s already been knocked down to the fourth-highest AAV in the league, and over the next 12 months, he’s going to keep falling further down that list.

Once 2027-28 comes around, the likes of Cale Makar, Quinn Hughes, Nikita Kucherov, and Jason Robertson will all have new contracts, and they will all likely come with AAV’s higher than $14 million. Those names combined with Macklin Celebrini’s $18.8 million contract kicking in will put Draisaitl down to ninth on the list for highest-paid contracts in the league.

By the time Connor McDavid enters the final year of his current deal, the highest he’ll be on the board is 13th, which is pretty shocking.

This is the new-age NHL. With the cap expected to jump up between $7 million and $10 million per season, these contracts are only going to get more and more expensive.

This highlights one thing for me: teams should be hunting for max term at all times.

If you have a young player who is showing promise, the smart play is to pay them whatever it takes to get them to agree to a max-term contract as soon as you can.

Imagine if, back before the 2023-24 season, the Edmonton Oilers had just bucked up and given Evan Bouchard a long-term deal after he had his second straight 40-point season. Even if that would have cost $7 million per year, which was $3.1 million more than he ended up getting on his bridge deal, he would be one the best value deals in the league and wouldn’t even be halfway through his extension.

Now, that was still in the flat- cap era, and the Oilers had forced themselves into a corner with some other really ugly contracts, so it probably wasn’t possible, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t learn from past mistakes when it comes to a player like Matt Savoie.

Sign him now and enjoy a value contract for years to come.

The other thing that this shows is that we are fully in the player empowerment era in the NHL.

A few years ago, a young superstar like Celebrini would have had to choose between betting on himself with a short-term deal that would bring him to free agency or getting the kind of money that comes with a long-term deal.

In the past, Celebrini would have been pushed to take the max eight-year term in order to get a record-setting $18.8 million AAV. 

Now? Well, he got to have his cake and eat it too.

He’s going to make $94 million over the course of this five-year deal and when it expires, he will be an unrestricted free agent at the age of 26. At that point, which is six years from now, the salary cap could be pushing $150 million, which means that the max AAV a player could sign for would be $30 million.

At that point, a seven-year at the maximum AAV, would be worth over $200 million, and Celebrini would absolutely be able to get it if he wanted to.

In the history of the NHL, there have only been eight contracts that have been worth over $100 million. There is a very real chance that we are less than a decade away from a player signing a deal that is worth double that.