Nominal vs present value
Local display: $21.3m · Rebased to 2024 USD via US CPI-U
How the total breaks down
New York Rangers salary. Part of a 7-year, $77m contract that briefly made him North American team sports' highest-paid player by annual value.
Endorsements. CCM and Reebok equipment deals, modest next to the size of his playing contract.
Impact 84
- Briefly held the highest per-year salary in North American major team sports
- Showed the cap-less market's ceiling just before the 2004–05 lockout closed it
- Made European-born stars command NHL's very top salaries for the first time
Jagr's Rangers contract, at $11 million a year, briefly topped every other North American team-sport salary on an annual basis — a symbolic marker of exactly how far pre-lockout NHL spending had run ahead of the league's actual television and gate revenue. It became one of the cautionary examples owners cited when negotiating the hard salary cap that followed only three years later.
Jagr's 2001 move to the New York Rangers, on a seven-year, $77 million deal, briefly made him the highest-paid player in North American major team sports on a per-year basis — ahead of any NBA, NFL or MLB salary at the time. The number stood out as a symbol of how far cap-less NHL spending had drifted from the league's actual revenue, one of the examples owners pointed to three years later when forcing through the 2005 salary cap.