The National Hockey League is still reverberating with yesterday’s news of a contract extension for Connor McDavid, transcendent captain of the Edmonton Oilers. McDavid’s current contract, which pays him US$12.5 million (C$17.4 million) a year, was set to run out at the end of the season that commences tonight. This led to a drama-filled summer: would McDavid, now aged 28, choose to test the open market and obtain a deal that might yield $20 million or more? He gave out a few quotes suggesting that anything was possible, ratcheting up the suspense, and then did the unthinkable — signing for another two years in Edmonton for the same $12.5 million.
The league’s highest-paid player, signed earlier in the offseason by Minnesota, is Russian winger Kirill Kaprizov, whose contract has an average annual value (AAV) of $17 million. McDavid won’t even be the highest-paid Oiler for the duration of the extension: his pal Leon Draisaitl, signed through 2030, makes an AAV of $14 million. The best-informed reporters correctly anticipated that McDavid would sign a short-term team-friendly extension, and his hockey pay is certainly less than half his overall income, but nobody came close to guessing the actual number.
As an Oilers fan, I almost found myself offended. He is, effectively, paying us to play here a little longer? (No indeed: he’s paying a billionaire owner to play here.) What the hell did we do to deserve this? Every sports fan is supposed to believe that their team expresses special localized virtues, and to view any good fortune as an expression of the mandate of heaven, but you are not supposed to get a Wayne Gretzky and a Connor McDavid in one lifetime.
Gretzky came to play in Edmonton, in an era of competing top-flight leagues, because a local meat-packing magnate was willing to give a lot of money to a skinny teenager: that was something that really did happen because Edmonton was Edmonton, an oil-rich ’70s frontier town with ostentatious ambitions. McDavid is here because ping-pong balls came out of a lottery tombola in a particular order.
Well, we don’t deserve McDavid, but you don’t either. In a salary-capped hockey universe he simply can’t get what he deserves (using a market-value definition of “deserves”) from any team. His decision to re-up with the Oilers cannot be read as anything but a message to the franchise, considered as a corporate object, and to Edmonton as well as the wider world. Oilers management has a short time to gather resources for a Stanley Cup victory, and is now under extreme pressure.
McDavid, who will pass Gretzky’s games-played total for the Oilers within a few weeks, has left the door open to leave town at the end of the new contract and make the most of his 30s financially. But he can never recover what he could easily have made in those two years, and he is taking on a risk of value-diminishing injury in those years that makes one’s skin crawl.
There’s a funny schizophrenia about the outside world’s reaction to the low-cost McDavid extension. Toronto podcasters and commentators instinctively felt and expressed the true horror of the announcement: maybe McDavid really wants to play in Toronto, as everybody in Toronto axiomatically believes, but he has just proven, at a very high cash cost, that he isn’t in any big hurry to do that.
Many of the same people were able to turn on a dime after absorbing the shock, praising McDavid for having what are, from a fan’s point of view, correctly-oriented athlete values: winning with your longtime teammates comes first, money second. There is a strong sense that McDavid has done the right thing, even if you hate the Oilers. (And, then again, if you love the Oilers, McDavid’s extension feels more like a gratuitous gift than the product of some professional obligation.)
Agents for other superstar players are a tad incensed that McDavid failed to set a higher benchmark for their own clients — but NHL players make a fixed fraction of overall league revenues, so when someone signs for Kaprizov money, it comes out of the pockets of the league proletariat. The ongoing debate over the ideal within-team salary distribution — no one at all has won a Cup yet while earning over $10 million — is bound to intensify. In view of the long national Stanley Cup drought, one almost has to wonder if the inherent advantages of teams in low-tax jurisdictions are actually amplified by the salary cap and its zero-sum logic.
Meanwhile, the Oilers also signed defenceman (and McDavid youth-hockey teammate) Jake Walman to a $7 million/seven-year extension yesterday, and there were widespread jokes about the team giving McDavid’s money back to Walman. Absolutely all of these jokes, let me add, were obviously made by people who were too sleepy-eyed to watch those late-night Western Conference playoff games last year. Walman’s a bargain too, dummies.
National Post