The Top 3 Overpaid Edmonton Oilers Right Now

As we wait for the Edmonton Oilers to officially start skating before the start of this season now is the perfect time to look at this upcoming season's roster and see where the issues may be. In the cap era of the NHL one of the main places that people look is the salary of a player. Every team has its players who are overpaid and underpaid. In this article, I am going to take a look at which three players I think are overpaid for the Edmonton Oilers.

Darnell Nurse- $9.25 Million AAV

We all knew that this was going to be a bad deal the moment the amount of this contract was announced. That this deal was not going to age well with Nurse unless he is the Edmonton Oilers' best defenseman. While is one of the best defensemen the amount he gets paid more than the rest of the Oilers d-core does not make sense.

For the Oilers' top 3 defensemen cap wise there is Nurse at the top making $9.25 million, second is Ekholm who has a cap hit of $6 million, which includes the $250,000 the Predators retained, then after that it is Evan Bouchard who currently makes $3.9 million. The problem that is about to come up is Bouchard is due to get another contract after this season which will give him a decent raise.

The concern for Oilers fans is the fact that he may want to make more than Nurse as Bouchard puts up much more points than every other defenseman on this team, mostly due to the fact he is on the powerplay, but points are points. I think if Nurse was signed for less money, then you would also be able to sign Evan Bouchard for less money.

So not only does the Nurse contract hurt you by itself, but I also think that is going to end up hurting the team in negotiations with Bouchard because Nurse will be used as a comparable when the two sides are trying to find the salary paid to Bouchard. Which will cause Bouchard to get more taking away money from other pieces of this team.