No way he's costing that much.
11 mill tops
Crosby signed a 5 year deal 1 year before his ELC expired. At the time he signed his deal, the salary cap was 50.3M. His deal was for 8.7M. That would mean his extension when signed accounted for roughly 17.3 percent of the salary cap.
The cap this year is 75M. If McDavid extends a year early, you're looking at 17.3 percent of the current cap ceiling equaling to roughly a 13M contract for McDavid. Funny enough, the exact number is 12.975. Take away the 5 at the end, and 5x12.97M has a pretty cute ring to it....(Spoilers: His number is 97)
Crosby is the only real comparable with how successful McDavid has been so far.
Here's another comparable....McDavid will have 4 RFA years left when his ELC expires, meaning an 8 year deal would buy 4 UFA years. It's hard to put a value on the 5th UFA year in Crosby's initial contract because his contract wasn't really structured in a deliberate way where his 4 RFA years where cheaper, but the first 3 UFA years of Crosby's big extension cost 12M on a 60M cap.....what is that percentage?.....ding ding ding...20 percent...aka max....
So from this, we can assume that the price for the 4 UFA years in McDavid's contract might be 20 percent of a 75M cap, which would be 15M per season. We've established above that Crosby's original 5 year deal would be similar to almost 13M. Now this isn't a perfect comparison because there was 1 UFA year in there, but it's funny that when you look at Crosby as a comparable and run all the numbers as a percentage of the cap, it potentially lines up like so on an 8 year deal...
(RFA: 13,13,13,13/UFA: 15,15,15,15)
Which coincidentally is a 14M AAV....the same AAV being reported.
Using Crosby's contract as a comparable, 14M makes a lot of sense.
