Cale Makar is the NHL's first $20 million man, and if you're a general manager who slow-played your best defenseman this summer, that number should ruin your week.
On Friday, August 28, the Avalanche and Makar agreed to an eight-year extension worth $163.2 million, an average annual value of $20.4 million. That's the highest AAV in league history and the largest total contract the NHL has ever handed out. It sits just below the max a player could sign for, which works out to 20 percent of next season's cap, or $20.8 million. Makar came within a hair of the ceiling. The deal begins in 2027-28 and runs through his age-35 season in 2034-35.
He still had a year left on his old contract, a six-year deal at a $9 million AAV signed back in 2021. He was set to reach free agency in 2027. Colorado didn't have to move now. They chose to.
Defensemen just crashed the top of the market
This reshapes the position. Makar's deal is the fourth record-setting contract in about eleven months, and the first three all went to forwards. Kirill Kaprizov reset things last September at $17 million. Leo Carlsson landed $18 million in July. Macklin Celebrini set the new bar a month ago at $18.8 million. Then a defenseman leapfrogged the entire group.
Until this summer, the blue line lived in a different tax bracket. Drew Doughty is heading into the final year of his deal at $11 million. In the years since he and Erik Karlsson signed, the only defenseman to even match that $11 million figure was Rasmus Dahlin. Makar's $20.4 million nearly doubles a benchmark that barely moved for the better part of a decade.
An agent put the shift bluntly to ESPN earlier this summer, saying the talk on the street was "anywhere between $15 and $20 million a year, depending upon the term," before adding, "Now we're starting to talk close to NBA comparables." That sounded aggressive in July. It reads like a floor now.
Makar is worth it, and it's not close. He's a two-time Norris winner who helped win the 2022 Cup and took home the Conn Smythe that spring. Last season he was third among defensemen in scoring with 79 points in 75 games. One honest caveat: he did not win the most recent Norris. He finished second to Zach Werenski. But a runner-up finish for a player who's been a Norris finalist as often as Makar isn't a knock. It's a rounding error on an all-time résumé.
Colorado read the calendar. Others are still reading it.
The timing here is the shrewd part. The current CBA runs through September 15. The new one, ratified last summer, takes over September 16 and caps re-signings with the same team at seven years instead of eight. In plain terms: before September 15, a team can sign a player to an eight-year extension. After that, the same contract maxes out at seven. Makar's eighth year only exists because Colorado closed the deal with a couple of weeks to spare.
And this wasn't a scramble. Back in June, GM Joe Sakic said Cale was "going to finish his career here," that the club was already talking to his agent, and that they expected to have him signed this summer. He said it out loud, then he did it. When the deal landed, Sakic called Makar "a generational defenseman" whose "accomplishments speak for themselves."
Colorado wasn't the only front office watching the clock, though. Chicago locked up Bowen Byram to an eight-year deal that also starts in 2027-28, at a $12.5 million AAV that Makar's number just blew past. So the "beat the deadline" move isn't unique. Where Colorado stands alone is the conviction. Nobody else committed to a defenseman at this altitude before the window closed.
The clock is now ticking louder in Minnesota
The cleanest contrast is Quinn Hughes. As of this writing, he remains unsigned with the Wild, and the same September 15 deadline that helped Makar is now bearing down on Minnesota, with training camp not far off. Hughes is playing out a six-year contract carrying a $7.85 million cap hit, a deal that's become one of the great bargains in hockey and a snapshot of how far this market has run in five years.
Elliotte Friedman floated the theory that the two camps were watching each other, wondering "who will go first." Well, Makar went first. I won't predict how Hughes ends up, because that story is still moving. But the precedent is set, and it's not just the raw dollars. Makar's deal will eat roughly 18 percent of Colorado's projected cap. Any camp negotiating for a top-tier defenseman now has a percentage to point at, not just a headline number.
Colorado saw where the market was going and paid to get in front of it. Some teams will spend the next two weeks wishing they'd done the same.
