Connor McDavid will be worth it as the NHL’s highest-paid player

The Edmonton Oilers are reportedly close to locking up franchise center Connor McDavid on a deal that would make him the highest-paid player in the NHL with a cap hit of $13.25 million over eight years. McDavid’s next contract would easily surpass those of Blackhawks stars Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane, who each get $10.5 million per season.

Over the coming days, weeks, months, and years, there will be a lot of discussion regarding how the Oilers will build around McDavid starting with the 2018-19 season, when the extension goes into effect.

A $13.25 million cap hit represents 17.7 percent of the current $75 million salary cap, so you’re talking about a huge chunk of Edmonton’s spending ability going to a single player. Even if the upper limit keeps rising, McDavid will eat up an outsized portion of his team’s cap space.

Yes, McDavid is a generational talent who could go down as one of the best to ever play the game, but $13.25 million is still a lot. Filling out the other 95 percent of the roster with 83 percent of your cap space isn’t an easy proposition.

But there’s a reason why everyone around the hockey world seems to agree this is a good deal, and it’s not just because the Oilers would be back at square one without their cornerstone. Even at the premium price of $13.25 million per year, McDavid will end up providing good value for Edmonton.

In the modern NHL, superstars are often underpaid. It may seem hard to believe when the best players are raking in eight-figure salaries, but if you look at who has benefited most from the increases in spending by teams over the past decade, it’s not the top players.

Back in 2004, the highest-paid players in the NHL, Peter Forsberg and Jaromir Jagr, were making $11 million each. At the time, the average NHL payroll was well below $50 million. Now teams are spending over $70 million each on players, yet the best of the best remain in the same financial bracket as before.

Part of this is the implementation of the salary cap in 2005, which unsurprisingly stifled spending from some big-money teams. There’s now a rule in place that says one player can’t take up more than 20 percent of the salary cap. But it also shows how team’s have swung toward spending more on role players, even though the stars are ultimately the driving forces behind winning.

With players of McDavid’s caliber, it’s almost impossible to overpay. When the Penguins extended Sidney Crosby, he got 17.3 percent of the cap. When the Capitals extended Alex Ovechkin, he got 19 percent of the cap. Kane, Toews, and Evgeni Malkin got closer to 15 percent.

Despite those big numbers, the Penguins, Capitals, and Blackhawks have been three of the most successful teams in the NHL over the past decade. That’s because having stars, even if they’re highly paid, is the best way to create sustainable success. It’s a lot easier to plug in role players at affordable costs, particularly with entry-level contracts, than to find and retain superstars.

And if your stars are good enough, you’ll probably be respectable even if the GM fails to surround them with amazing talent. That’s something we saw with the Penguins during their early 2010s stumbles, and the same happened to the Blackhawks over the past couple years after constant salary cap castoffs. Even when things didn’t go according to plan, these teams were pretty good. Ownership can go with that.

There are only a select few players in the league who can make an impact close to McDavid. Crosby is one of them, and players like Kane, Malkin, and Erik Karlsson are in the mix, too. These are guys who get their numbers no matter what, and demand attention from opponents whenever they’re on the ice. The game changes with their presence.

Yes, the McDavid extension will create problems. The Oilers need to re-sign another star center in Leon Draisaitl by next summer. They need to figure out what to do with goalie Cam Talbot. And they already have $15 million locked up long-term in Milan Lucic, Kris Russell, and Andrej Sekera. Solving this with over $13 million tied up in one guy isn’t easy.

The biggest issue is that the margin for error on overpaying role players thins when your stars are paid a premium, and Edmonton already has several guys whose contracts look questionable. They may end up needing to attach assets to move those contracts, like the Blackhawks did with Bryan Bickell and Teuvo Teravainen, in order to keep their stars together.

But McDavid won’t be the problem. He’s about to get paid, and it’s a deal the Oilers needed to make.