Get the loud one out of the way first.
Yes, the Anaheim Ducks matched a five-year, $90 million offer sheet from the Philadelphia Flyers to keep Leo Carlsson, swallowing an $18 million cap hit in the process. That's the number everyone screenshotted. That's the deal that made people spit out their coffee.
But the 2026 free-agent contract most likely to get regretted isn't Carlsson's. It's Alex Tuch's.
The scariest word in an NHL contract has never been the dollar figure. It's the length.
Tuch was moved to the Washington Capitals by the Buffalo Sabres in a sign-and-trade, and the price of doing business was an eight-year, $84 million contract, roughly a $10.5 million cap hit per season. Do the math on the calendar, not just the cap sheet. Eight years is the max term you can hand out. It's a commitment that runs deep into a player's 30s, and it's where good deals go to slowly rot.
Carlsson's number is eye-watering, but it's five years on a young, ascending center, the most valuable commodity in the sport. You can talk yourself into that risk. You can't talk your way around the calendar on an eight-year wing deal. Wingers don't age like wine, they age like milk, and the last three years of a max-term contract are usually the stretch where fans groan every time the cap hit flashes on screen.
That's the trap. The first couple seasons of a deal like this will look fine. Nobody regrets year one. It's years six, seven and eight, when the player has slowed down, the contract can't be moved, and the front office is trying to build a roster around a salary it can't shed, that turn a signing into a cautionary tale. This league has run through this plot plenty of times before, and it never changes much.
The structure only sharpens the point. This wasn't a cap-flush team taking a flier on a bargain. It was a sign-and-trade, meaning Washington paid a trade cost and still committed the max term to lock him in. When you pay twice to get someone, the leash on that decision is short and the patience runs thin.
So when we look back in a few seasons and ask which 2026 signing aged the worst, don't point at the $18 million headline. Point at the eight-year one. Big cap hits on young stars can grow into their price. Long term on a veteran winger only loses value from the day the ink dries.
The Tuch deal is the one Washington reopens in the back half and wishes it could tear up. Length is the killer. It always has been.