July 13, 2023 by Ryan Lotsberg

The Edmonton Oilers have two important restricted free agents that need to be signed, Evan Bouchard and Ryan McLeod. Bouchard’s contract is likely to be the more lucrative of the two, but it will be handled later because McLeod has filed for salary arbitration. The Oilers won’t be in control of the number that the arbitrator awards should the contract not be signed prior to the hearing. They won’t know how much cap space they have left to sign Bouchard until the McLeod situation is sorted. This is a neutral observer’s look at McLeod’s arbitration case.

McLeod waited until the first day of training camp last year to sign a team friendly one year, $798,000 contract. That was a pay cut from his previous cap hit of $834,167 and average annual salary of $925,000 after performance bonuses from his entry level contract. There will be no such pay cut this time around.

First, let’s evaluate the strengths of McLeod. He plays many roles on the team. Ken Holland recently anointed him as the third line centre. He was fourth among Oilers forwards in ice time per game on the penalty kill, and one of the players ahead of him was rental Nick Bjugstad. McLeod also plays on the second unit powerplay. His greatest strength is his skating. He’s great at carrying the puck through the neutral zone and into the offensive zone. 

McLeod’s shot shares have been above 50% through all three of his NHL seasons, and his Corsi for percentage was 53.94% this past season. His 55.89% scoring chances for percentage last season was fantastic. His high danger chances for percentage of 59.45% last season was outstanding, and his high danger goals for percentages of 57.14% and 61.54% in the last two seasons are tremendous.

McLeod has a lot going for him, but we have to analyze his deficiencies here as well. His biggest issue is that he gets funneled to the corner with the puck far too often and he fails to drive the puck to the net. He will skate through the middle of the offensive zone without the puck, but getting to the dirty areas with the puck on his stick is a big area for improvement. The Oilers could look at McLeod’s multiple injuries in 2022-23 and express wariness about the player’s durability. McLeod isn’t strong at faceoffs. He has a career faceoff percentage of 47.9%, and he only eclipsed 50% in his rookie season. The 2022-23 season was the first one where McLeod’s goal share was above 50%, reaching 50.94%. He only spent 20% of his ice time playing against elite competition last season. He spent 80% of his time playing against middle and low level competition last season, yet his goal share was less than inspiring. 

It should be noted that according to PuckIQ, McLeod won the goal share battle against elite competition 6-2 last season, and 9-5 in 2021-22. That could be viewed as a positive, but you could argue the fact that he was outscored 7-12 against middle level competition in each of the last two seasons is concerning.

All of that information and more is likely to come up during the hearing, but that information does nothing to get us to a number as fans. Comparable contracts are not allowed to be used as arguments in arbitration hearings, but we can use them for our own argument! It’s easy for agents to say that “x player got x amount, so my client deserves at least that”. McLeod’s camp could easily point to ex-teammate Klim Kostin’s new two year, $4 million deal with the Detroit Red Wings and say that Kostin got two less points in the same amount of games, Kostin is a year older than McLeod, and Kostin has played in 35 fewer NHL games to date. By that logic, McLeod should get more than what Kostin got.

CapFriendly has a fantastic contract comparables tool, which allows you to enter customized information to find similar contracts that have been signed over the years. I entered McLeod’s stats into the tool and picked out the top ten most comparable contracts based on points, games played, and age. I included the percentage of the cap that the contract consumed rather than the actual dollar amount to adjust for different eras. The contracts noted in the table below range from 2006-2019. 

Player	Points	Games Played	Points per Game	Cap %	Signing Age
Antoine Vermette	47	139	0.34	2.27%	23
Lars Eller	47	163	0.29	1.92%	23
Adam Lowry	40	154	0.26	1.54%	23
Jim Slater	39	145	0.27	1.54%	24
Brooks Laich	40	151	0.26	1.44%	24
Andrew Copp	31	142	0.22	1.33%	22
Chandler Stephenson	29	144	0.2	1.29%	25
Michael Backlund	46	138	0.33	1.21%	23
Dustin Boyd	38	132	0.29	1.14%	23
Brad Richardson	40	136	0.29	1.04%	23
AVERAGE	39.7	144.4	0.275	1.472%	23.3
Ryan McLeod	45	138	0.33	RFA	23

The average of 1.472% of the current $83.5 million cap works out to $1,229,120. McLeod’s productivity is above the average, so I would expect his cap percentage to be above this average as well.

Two of these players had production nearly identical to McLeod’s at the same age. Michael Backlund had one more point than McLeod in the same number of games played, and he ended up at 1.21% of the cap on a one-year deal, which would be $1,010,350 in today’s landscape. Backlund’s deal was definitely team friendly. Antoine Vermette had two more points in one more game played than McLeod. Vermette and McLeod both averaged 0.4 points per game in the season previous to signing their contracts at age 23. Vermette ended up with a two-year deal worth 2.27% of the cap. That 2.27% figure represents the high mark on this list. That equates to $1,895,450 for next season. 

I believe that McLeod will likely ask for a number a shade over $2 million, while the Oilers will want to keep him closer to that $1.5 million mark. I think that a deal similar to Vermette’s deal in 2006 will end up being pretty close to what McLeod gets here. I’m going to predict that McLeod will sign a two-year deal with an average annual value of $1.9 million.

Related: Oilers Sign Connor Brown

That would leave the Oilers with $5,257,500 to sign Bouchard and to round out the roster. The active roster would be at 20 players after signing McLeod and Bouchard, and the team can carry up to 23 players. I’m going to assume that potential players 21, 22, and 23 would all be at the league minimum of $775,00 for simplicity’s sake. Here is the maximum amount of cap space the Oilers would have available to give to Bouchard in each roster scenario:

21 players – $4,482,500

22 players – $3,707,500

23 players – $2,932,500

I’ll do a piece on Bouchard’s situation in the coming weeks, but I’ll say that I don’t see the Oilers carrying 23 players on the active roster. It might even be hard for them to carry 22 players.