What would happen if Darnell Nurse were to retire?

Last in my series on what the Edmonton Oilers should do with Darnell Nurse, I’ll be looking at what would happen if Nurse decided to retire.

I would like to preface this article by saying that I personally have not heard any rumour that Nurse might retire, nor do I mean to suggest that he might or should retire.

Rather, while looking into the possibility of Nurse being bought out by the Oilers, the question of what happens to a players salary if they retire came to mind.

So this post will be a look into just that: If a player retires while he is still under contract, what happens to the contract?

The grisly details of a retirement

Going through the CBA to find the answer is a nightmare, but in the end it isn’t that complicated. It’s all just a bunch of professional sounding terms to make you feel small and insignificant, and I do, but here’s the mostly accurate gristle:

First and foremost, a player does not get paid the remainder of their contract if they retire while under contract.

A player’s salary each year is made up of a “base salary” and “bonuses.” A player may be making a small base salary and lots of bonuses or vice versa. A player is also probably not making the same amount of money each year. Naturally a player would like to have as much money as early as possible in the contract. Therefore a lot of players, especially the better ones, have “front loaded” contracts, which means they make a lot of money in the early years and less in the later years.

When you add up all the base salaries and bonuses for the length of a player’s contract, you get the total contract amount. Then that total contract amount is divided by the number of years of the contract to get the Average Annual Value (AAV), which is always how much a player counts against the cap each year (called the cap hit). When we talk about a player signing a $12.5M x eight contract, like Connor McDavid did, it means their total salary is $12.5M x 8 = $100M, but it doesn’t mean they get paid $12.5M each year.

If a player retires while they are still under contract, the team essentially is “charged” with the difference between how much they have already paid the player and his total cap hit to date. Then that is divided by the years left on the contract and that amount counts against their cap each year that is left on the players contract.

What this means for Nurse

That is maybe confusing so let’s look at what that would mean for Darnell Nurse and the Oilers if he were to retire.

Here is a graph showing the breakdown of Nurse’s contract according to puckpedia.com: