Connor McDavid is heading into a deal that already looks like a bargain by modern NHL standards, and the real conversation is no longer whether he’ll get paid - it’s how high Edmonton will have to go when the next contract arrives.
The Oilers captain is set to play out a new two-year, $25-million contract with a $12.5 million AAV that he signed last October. That deal runs through the end of the 2027-28 NHL season, and plenty of the talk around it has centered on whether McDavid will still be in Edmonton when it expires.
That question matters, especially after the Oilers were bounced in the first round of last year’s playoffs. But if you assume he stays, the next contract becomes the bigger story.
And that next number has been pushed upward by a wild summer around the league.
Macklin Celebrini reset the market last month with a five-year extension carrying an $18.8-million cap hit, making him the NHL’s highest-paid player. Before that, Leo Carlsson briefly held the top spot with an $18-million cap hit from an offer sheet he signed earlier in the summer.
Neither player is even 22 yet, and neither has put together anything close to McDavid’s career. Still, those deals matter because they show just how fast the ceiling is climbing.
McDavid is now ninth in the league in average annual value, and he’s not even the highest-paid player on his own team, with Leon Draisaitl sitting at $14 million. That alone says plenty about how the market has shifted. If McDavid walks into his next negotiation and decides he wants to reset the board again, Celebrini’s $18.8 million should be the floor for the cap hit, regardless of term.
The salary cap only adds more fuel to the fire. Under league rules, the maximum cap hit on a contract is 20 per cent of the salary cap ceiling in the year the deal begins.
This season, the ceiling is $104 million, which puts the current max at $20.8 million. Nobody has hit that number yet, but the league may not stay that way for long.
The cap is projected to climb to $113.5 million for the 2027-28 season, and early estimates have it reaching as high as $123 million for 2028-29, which would be the first season of McDavid’s next contract. Using that figure, the maximum cap hit he could command would land around $24.6 million.
So where does that leave Edmonton?
It’s hard to imagine McDavid handing the Oilers another huge discount. A realistic range for his next cap hit seems to run from just above Celebrini’s $18.8 million all the way to the projected max of $24.6 million.
Sure, he could simply ask for a full max deal on a long-term contract, which would come out to seven years and $172.2 million - the biggest contract in NHL history by a mile. The Oilers would almost certainly move fast if that were on the table.
But that doesn’t really fit McDavid’s pattern.
He has already taken discounts on both of his post-ELC contracts, and he could do it again if Edmonton shows it can keep building toward success. That said, this current deal was the kind of team-friendly number that won’t likely be repeated in the same way.
The sweet spot may be something closer to a seven-year deal at a $22-million cap hit, which would total $154 million. That would nearly double his current AAV, put him at the top of the league, and end the speculation for a long stretch.
A lot can change before then. But if the numbers keep moving the way they have this summer, McDavid is lined up to break new ground when he signs his next contract.
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