Oilers: Some thoughts on Ryan Nugent-Hopkins contract extension

Earlier this week the Edmonton Oilers announced they had re-signed the Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. The deal is for $41 million over 8 seasons. Thanks to Pierre Lebrun’s Twitter account, we could see the breakdown as follows:

21-22: $5M salary

22-23: $5.25M salary

23-24: $6.25M salary

24-25: $6.25M salary

25-26: $4M salary plus $2M sb

26-27: $2.25M salary plus $2.5M sb

27-28: $2.5M salary plus $1.25M sb

28-29: $3.75M salary

This is a quintessential Ken Holland contract. Back when the salary cap was 1st introduced in the 2005-06 season, Holland in Detroit used the 1st couple of years of it to sign his players to contracts with even bigger gaps like this – often in the 2nd last to last years of the contract, it would go down from $5 million or so to $1 million or so. This was designed to lower the cap hit – which of course the player won’t care about but the team will – to help Holland circumvent the cap in Detroit.

Then the league intervened and made a rule that you can’t decrease the salary in a multi-year contract year over year by more than 20% and Holland had to make his contracts with less extreme differences in salary.  Let’s take a closer look at the pros and cons of this contract: