NHL-ийн багууд туршлага багатай залуу тоглогчидтой өндөр үнийн дүн бүхий урт хугацааны гэрээ байгуулж байна

The news of Buffalo Sabres rookie Noah Ostlund signing an eight-year, $52.8 million contract extension dropped late Monday morning, roughly 36 hours before the NHL’s new collective bargaining agreement comes into effect and wipes out the ability for players to reach deals that long.

A few minutes later, a friend of mine dropped his thoughts into a longstanding group chat I’m in with seven diehard sports fans.

“I literally have no idea who this is,” the friend wrote about Ostlund.

And he’s not alone.

Not long ago, the idea of an undersized forward prospect with 68 career NHL games and 27 career points receiving more than $50 million would have been unthinkable. While Ostlund was a first-round pick — No. 16 in 2022 — he’s far from a household name or an established contributor. Typically, those players have needed to wait for their paydays, often until they were closer to becoming unrestricted free agents in their mid- to late-20s.

With the NHL’s salary cap beginning to dramatically rise and fewer stars than ever making it to free agency, however, these types of contracts are popping up more and more. In fact, seven of the 15 richest deals ever given to players with less than 100 games experience have been signed in the past 14 months, according to PuckPedia. And three of those contracts — including Ostlund’s new deal — were completed in the past 40 days.

This trend is partly the result of a rush to get deals done under the old CBA, which allowed for eight-year terms and more generous signing-bonus and frontloading structures than the new agreement. Another factor: Many of these new and somewhat experimental contracts that were signed very early in players’ careers have turned out fantastically well for their teams.

Headlining that list of the 15 biggest contracts given to young players — all of them with under 100 games of NHL experience and receiving $32 million or more — is basically a who’s who of the most underpaid talent from around the league:

• Young top-pair defensemen Lane Hutson (Montreal), Brock Faber (Minnesota) and Jake Sanderson (Ottawa) all have plenty of term and cap hits under $9 million in an environment where top D are beginning to command more than double that.
• Dylan Guenther, who scored 40 goals for the Utah Mammoth last season, currently has the 129th-highest cap hit in the league with his contract worth an average annual value of $7.14 million.
• Two young forwards who starred during the 2026 Stanley Cup playoffs, the Wild’s Matt Boldy and Hurricanes’ Jackson Blake, are signed through their primes for $7 million and $5.1 million a season, respectively.

The success that the Canadiens, Wild, Senators, Mammoth and Hurricanes have enjoyed with those above deals has, understandably, created some copycats. But while players such as Hutson — who won the Calder Trophy as rookie of the year before signing his contract last fall — had already established themselves as top NHL talents, others now landing these contracts are far from sure things.

Ostlund is far from the most egregious example, as he could well live up to his $6.6 million-a-season cap hit until 2035, despite spending last year mostly as a depth contributor. If the salary cap rises to $150 million by the midway point of the contract, his salary will be the equivalent of a $4.2 million player last season — that of a middle-six forward — and drop from there.

A bigger gamble could be the contract that the Vancouver Canucks gave 20-year-old defenseman Zeev Buium two weeks ago: an eight-year deal worth $75.04 million (nearly $9.4 million per season), the largest ever contract for a player with under 100 NHL games played. A month earlier, the Pittsburgh Penguins awarded 23-year-old forward Ville Koivunen an eight-year deal for $4 million a season even though he had played just 47 NHL games and produced 14 points while spending half of 2025-26 in the minors.

Prior to Koivunen, the largest cap-era contract ever given to a player with fewer than 50 NHL games was a modest two-year, $11 million deal for KHL veteran Andrei Kuzmenko with the Canucks in 2023.

Some veteran team executives around the league are alarmed by the trend; one such front-office official, who spoke anonymously to opine on opposing clubs’ decisions, described some recent contracts as “look(ing) like reckless gambling.” But one player agent, who similarly spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide a candid assessment, suggested that teams are trying to make calculated bets on homegrown talent while still banking on increasing cap room in future years as a hedge against any possible mistakes.

Because these players are so young, there’s also a type of built-in get-out-of-jail-free card involved in many of these deals. The NHL’s CBA includes a little-used provision that allows players who are 25 years old and younger to be bought out for just one-third of the remainder of their contracts (compared to two-thirds for players age 26 and up). It’s not a coincidence that many of these recently signed deals are structured to retain such a possibility, with minimal cap penalties.

“These teams know what they have in these players,” said the agent, who doesn’t represent any of the three recently signed rookies mentioned above. “If they end up being right, they are very good signings for the teams. If they end up being very wrong, they have a few years in which they can buy out (the contracts) at one-third (the cost) and barely have it impact their cap.”

At the moment, Koivunen is listed No. 1 among the “most popular” searches on PuckPedia’s buyout calculator, even though he’s yet to play a game under his new contract. If he is bought out two years from now, the Penguins would need to pay him just $8.75 million to get out of the final six years of the contract, and the cap hit incurred would be relative peanuts: between $229,000 and $729,000 a season over the following 12 years.

Whether any of these deals end up in that circumstance remains to be seen. But it’s clear GMs are only getting more aggressive — not just with how much they’re willing to pay young players, but with how early they do so. But that boldness ups the likelihood of misfires, given the guessing game involved with such untested talent.

Ultimately, the teams that can best project their young players will reap the benefits of locking up a $10 million or $15 million talent for a heavy discount. The reality, too, is that players as young and inexperienced as Koivunen, Buium and Ostlund aren’t likely going to turn down paydays of $30 million to $75 million, even if it means potentially leaving money on the table should their careers take off. As some of the NHL’s top teams have proven in recent years, including the reigning Cup-champion Hurricanes with Blake, immense value can be found there.

Which means the longstanding salary norms we’ve grown accustomed to in the NHL are about to be blown up in another new way, as teams chase contract efficiency above all else.

“All (of these) contract records are going to be broken in the next 24 months,” the agent predicted.