Are NHL teams betting too high on unproven talent?

The final weeks before the puck drops on the 2026-27 NHL season have brought some of the largest contracts in NHL history, as teams and players adapt to a rising salary cap and rush to lock up deals before eight-year deals become a thing of the past. 

While mid-September can often be a quiet time in the hockey calendar, it was brimming with major deals in the NHL, including a new eight-year, $50.8 million deal for Washington Capitals’ forward Justin Sourdif, an eight-year, $52.8 million deal for Buffalo Sabres center Noah Östlund, and an eight-year, $75.04 million contract extension for Vancouver Canucks blueliner Zeev Buium. 

With major contracts being given out, teams are securing their futures—but there are few assurances that some of the younger, largely unproven talent will live up to their potential. 

On a recent episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, co-hosts Tyler Yaremchuk and Carter Hutton, a former NHL goaltender, dove into the new world of contracts and their impact on those who signed them. 

Yaremchuk: The flip side is that some of these aren’t going to age well. Like, you can look at Washington giving Justin Sourdif $6.35 million on an eight-year deal. That is $50 million over eight years for a guy who has played one full season in the NHL. He’s played exactly 82 career games, and he’s young, but not that young at 24. You can look at Buffalo giving Noah Östlund an eight-year deal. He’s only played 68 games in the NHL, and you can look at them and go, “Wow, those were really a really good 68 games, a good rookie season, all that, but that doesn’t mean the next 600 are going to be good. With Sourdif, what if he plateaus as a third liner who gets you 12 to 16 goals, because that’s more or less what he did for you in his rookie season? 

Look at Fraser Minten in Boston, $7.2 million. That’s an encouraging start to a career. Lots of guys have had encouraging starts to their careers, and they don’t become zeros, but they plateau as, let’s call them, middle-six guys who don’t have that top-line point potential. You give these guys all contracts, but they’re not all going to work out, and I think in three or four years we’re going to be looking at a few of these and being like, “Oh man, they gave that guy how much money four years ago, and now he’s a 45-40 point player.”

Hutton: I think the other side of it too is like a personality test too. I think that’s where you have to understand the player you have, the personality you have, because there is that job security you’re giving out. There is such a grind to getting these contracts right, and the tension you’re under. Then I also truly believe that there is like a decompression that comes with that, just as an athlete, like for me in my career, and I’m bouncing around trying to find my cut my teeth in the NHL, and all of a sudden I get a two-way deal in Nashville, and then I’m getting like a two-year deal in St. Louis for a million bucks, and I’m getting a three-year deal for $8 million, and it’s like, how do you grind the same? How do you do that? 

I think there are character traits that you have to be very cautious of when you’re giving guys life-changing money. I’m not going to say guys are checking out, but an eight-year deal, $80 million, things change, right? There’s always the saying that it’s easier to get up and run when you don’t have silk sheets, right? Like when you’re making that kind of money, life changes. I think that’s a factor of the personality traits. 

You can catch the full contract discussion and more on the recent episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE right here.