Connor McDavid Is About To Be A Very Rich Boy
The biggest piece of yesterday’s Eberle for Strome trade was the salary cap. Ryan Strome is $3.5 million cheaper than Jordan Eberle. If you’re a basketball fan or a football fan, that doesn’t really seem like much. But in hockey, that’s a whole extra player’s worth of salary. So when you look at Edmonton’s books today, they are $24 million away from the salary cap ceiling. You can probably take $4-4.5 million away from that right off the bat for what they’re about to give to Kris Russell. That still leaves you with about $20 million to play with. They still have to sign Leon Draisaitl and have a Connor McDavid extension coming up. But that still sounds like a shit ton of free money, right? Wrong.
Again, anybody who doesn’t pay attention to contracts in hockey won’t be too blown away by that number. $14 million won’t even get you JJ Redick today. But the highest cap hits in the league right now are Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane who are both at $10.5 million. Anze Kopitar is right there at $10.
That number will probably go down a little for McDavid before he actually throws his Herbie Hancock on the contract. But there’s still 100% certainty that Connor McDavid is going to be the highest paid player in the NHL before he’s 21 years old. Imagine being friends with that guy.
