What Does The K’Andre Miller Signing Mean For The Edmonton Oilers?

Yesterday the New York Rangers re-signed K’Andre Miller to a 2 year deal with an AAV of $3.872 million. This means the Edmonton Oilers now have a direct comparable to look at when it comes to an Evan Bouchard extension.

Last season these two players had almost identical stats. Miller has 9 goals and 34 assists in 79 games, and Evan Bouchard got 8 and 32 assists in 82. When it comes to the numbers, Miller put up more points than Bouchard.

The numbers here are close enough though that you can basically say that whatever Miller gets I would expect Bouchard to get almost the exact same amount. This means the Edmonton Oilers should be expecting to give Bouchard more than $3 million a year.

What Does This Mean For The Edmonton Oilers?

According to CapFriendly the Edmonton Oilers current cap space is $5,620,000 and a roster of 18. If they sign Evan Bouchard for just $3.5 million that would give them around $2 million to sign Ryan McLeod which would give them a roster of 20. The Edmonton Oilers would need to bring up at least one player to get to a 21-man roster.

This could become an issue for the Edmonton Oilers if they get into some minor injuries. If the team gets a flu bug rolling through the room and you have more than one player out for a short period of time the team would need to dress less than a full team.

They had this issue at the start of last season. It may not cause an issue, but the potential is there for it to cause an issue.

The good news though is at least they do not have to make any moves to become cap compliant as I don’t see McLeod and Bouchard’s deals combined totalling more than the $5.6 million in space the Edmonton Oilers have left.

On opening day I would expect the lines to look like this:

Hyman – McDavid – Brown

Nugent-Hopkins – Draisaitl – Kane

Holloway- McLeod – Foegele

Janmark – Pederson – Ryan

Nurse – Ceci

Ekholm – Bouchard

Kulak – Desharnais

Broberg