Oilers lead league in salary cap penalties for next season

With the off-season approaching, it's already becoming time to look towards next season in terms of cap room. With the crazy cap crunch that every team is under right now, it's a miracle that the cap space is going up. If the cap weren't going up in the off-season, there wouldn't be nearly enough money to go around.

It shows how dire the situation is when you see that overage penalties are being taken by 11 of the 32 teams in the league. The list of teams with overage penalties for next season has been revealed by CapFriendly and it doesn't look great for Edmonton next season.


Overage penalties are given to teams when performance bonuses are worked into players' contracts and are reached by the player. One example of this is Connor Brown's contract which was only a 750k cap hit, but included a 3.25M bonus if he played in 10 games this season. Since the bonus couldn't be applied to this year's cap hit, the full thing rolls over into next year. The Oilers are in the most hot water with the overage penalties for next season, leading the league in overages for next season.


https://www.dailyfaceoff.com/news/sources-oilers-stars-and-caps-among-11-teams-with-record-salary-cap-overages-for-2024-25

Because of Brown's performance bonus, the Oilers take a penalty of 3.45M into next season. The cap will rise 4.3M next season, so the Oilers will be left with just over 800k of that space for the season. They will have to do a lot more cap gymnastics to be cap compliant next year, but it's something Holland has had to do in his entire tenure with the Oilers.