Connor McDavid's $12.5M Deal: Underpaid on Purpose

Connor McDavid had the best case in hockey for asking for a raise. He didn’t ask for one.

On October 6, 2025, the Edmonton Oilers announced a two-year, $25 million contract extension for their captain — an average annual value of $12.5 million. That’s the exact number McDavid signed for back in 2017, in the dead-cap-adjusted, salary-explosion NHL of a decade later. It’s less than his own teammate makes. It’s nowhere close to what the market had just proven a player of his caliber is worth. And McDavid came up with the figure himself.

Five months after signing it, he went out and led the league in scoring for the sixth time.

The Deal He Signed

McDavid was entering the final year of the 8-year, $100 million contract he’d signed on July 5, 2017 — also a $12.5 million AAV — when he and the Oilers agreed to the new two-year extension, per NHL.com’s own report. It kicks in for the 2026-27 season and runs through 2027-28, at which point McDavid becomes an unrestricted free agent for the first time in his career.

The number is strikingly team-friendly by the league’s current market. Teammate Leon Draisaitl is in the first season of an 8-year, $112 million deal worth $14 million a year. Minnesota’s Kirill Kaprizov, coming off a monster season of his own, signed an 8-year, $136 million contract worth $17 million annually. McDavid — by most measures the best player in hockey — will earn less than both of them. He won’t even be Edmonton’s highest-paid player.

“It gives us a chance to continue chasing down what we’ve been chasing down here with the core guys we have in here, and we have a little bit of money to work with too,” McDavid said, explaining the two-year term. “It gives the core guys that have been here a really long time, and guys in this room that have come here, a chance to be a part of something special.” Asked about the financial side of it, he was blunter still: “It’s about winning, and that’s always what I preached, and I think this deal gives both sides what we’re looking for.”

The cap room wasn’t hypothetical. The same day the extension was announced, Oilers GM Stan Bowman signed defenseman Jake Walman to a 7-year, $49 million deal — a move the extra flexibility from McDavid’s discount made possible. Rival captain Auston Matthews, of the Toronto Maple Leafs, summed up the read around the league: “I think for him, it’s all about winning.”

The Season That Followed

If there was ever a case that McDavid can be trusted with less, the 2025-26 season made it. He played all 82 games and put up 48 goals, 90 assists and 138 points, finishing eight points ahead of Kucherov to win his sixth career Art Ross Trophy as the NHL’s leading scorer, according to NHL.com. That ties him with Gordie Howe and Mario Lemieux for the second-most scoring titles in league history — only Wayne Gretzky, with 10, has more. It was also McDavid’s sixth straight 100-point season and the third time he’s cleared 130.

Across his 11 NHL seasons, he now stands at 409 goals, 811 assists and 1,220 points, per Yardbarker’s reporting on the trophy.

What he didn’t get was the Hart Trophy. Nikita Kucherov, who beat McDavid out with a league-leading 1.71 points per game across 76 games, won it instead — his second career MVP award. The margin was as thin as league voting gets: 1,436 points to McDavid’s 1,426, a gap of just 10, with Kucherov edging him 72 first-place votes to 68. It was the first time since the 1995-96 season that all three Hart finalists cleared 25% of the first-place vote, per NHL.com — a three-way race with essentially no separation, decided against the player who’d just outscored the winner by eight points.

Why the Discount, Actually

None of this happens in a vacuum. Edmonton has made the last two Stanley Cup Finals and lost both — to the same team. In 2024, the Panthers beat the Oilers in seven games despite McDavid mounting a historic comeback from down 3-0 in the series; he still won the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP, just the sixth player ever to win it on the losing side. In 2025, Florida beat Edmonton again, four games to two, repeating as champions. The Oilers haven’t won a Stanley Cup since 1990 — the one trophy missing from a résumé that already includes three Hart Trophies (2017, 2021, 2023), five Ted Lindsay Awards, a Rocket Richard Trophy and now six Art Ross Trophies.

The two-year term is itself a message. Rather than locking in a long-term below-market deal the way some stars have, McDavid set a short fuse: three seasons, including this seven-year-old contract’s final year, to finally win the one thing he hasn’t, before he can test unrestricted free agency for the first time. Bowman, Edmonton’s GM, downplayed any negotiation over the money at all: the conversations, he said, were “really more of a dialogue and a conversation throughout the last few months and really nothing to do with the contract itself.”

What He’s Actually Worth

Outside the rink, McDavid’s endorsement portfolio includes Adidas, CCM, Rogers, Coca-Cola’s BodyArmor and CIBC, among others — brand deals that are well documented but whose individual financial terms mostly aren’t public. As for his overall net worth, treat any number you see with real skepticism. Celebrity Net Worth put it at $70 million as of his October 2025 extension; that’s one outlet’s estimate, built on undisclosed methodology, not an audited figure — the same caveat that applies to nearly every “net worth” number published about active athletes. What’s actually verifiable is the contract math: $100 million over the eight years from 2017, followed by this $25 million two-year bridge at the same rate he’s been paid since before he turned 21.

The Bottom Line

Most star athletes negotiate for the biggest number the market will bear. McDavid negotiated for a smaller one, on the logic that the team he plays for needs the room more than he needs the raise — and then he went out and proved, statistically, that he’s still the best player alive at the same salary he was making in 2019. The Hart voters gave the MVP trophy to someone else by 10 points. The Oilers, with a three-season window and a captain who just left money on the table twice — first in the contract, then in the vote — will take the deal.

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