Cap comparables: How Kirill Kaprizov’s contract begins to reset the market

Nearly a year ago, Minnesota Wild owner Craig Leipold declared that no team would be able to offer Kirill Kaprizov more money and was confident GM Bill Guerin would be able to retain the Russian’s services before his $9-million AAV contract expired in 2026. And in theory Leipold was right — since the Wild could offer one more year than any other team on a contract, and Minnesota did have the leverage to offer more total dollars than competitors in an open, free-agent market.

The question was: would he want to stay? The Wild have big plans for this core and have signed a few members of it to multi-year deals already. But Kaprizov was at the centre of it, the prized superstar who was a frontrunner for the Hart Trophy last year before a mid-season injury limited him to 41 games. Without Kaprizov, the Wild would have had to significantly recalculate their plans.

So it was more than a little nerve-wracking when Kaprizov turned down a $128-million contract earlier this pre-season, a total that already would have been the richest deal in NHL history. But the game is changing and contract values — especially for superstar players — are quickly going to become detached from benchmarks set over the past five or six years. While the upper limit of the salary cap rose $6.5 million from 2019-20 to 2024-25, it jumped $7.5 million from 2024-25 to 2025-26 and is projected to jump another $8.5 million by next season.

“That’s a lot of new money in the system that, frankly, a year or two ago we certainly had no idea was going to be available,” Leipold said last week. “So, it does change things, but we have to change with it.”

The expectation should be that superstars can push the limit more than ever, and the 2026 class of free agents will be the first to really put this to the test, with Connor McDavid, Kyle Connor, Jack Eichel, Artemi Panarin, and (previously) Kaprizov the headliners on expiring deals. None of them signed in the summer and it’s been a bit of a waiting game.

Finally on Tuesday, Kaprizov signed for $136 million over eight years, a $17-million AAV that sets the tone for what’s ahead and changes the outlook in a few ways:

• In total dollars it’s the most expensive contract in league history, even passing some of the deals signed before term limits were introduced. Since maximum-term lengths are being reduced from eight to seven years for re-signing players next year, we may not see this total passed right away. But with where the cap is going, it may only take an extra two or three years before someone gets $19.5 million and seven years.

• Kaprizov’s $17-million AAV surpasses the current league high, Leon Draisaitl’s $14 million. Draisaitl is only in the first season of that contract right now. That $3 million increase is the biggest single-season jump in a league-high AAV during the cap era.

• When Kaprizov’s extension kicks in next season, the salary cap is projected to be $104 million, meaning his $17-million AAV will account for 16.35 per cent of the cap. That also is a substantial market-setter, given the cap percentage of these other recent superstar deals that set a new bar in AAV when they were signed:

CAP % WHEN CONTRACT STARTS

In the aftermath of Kaprizov’s monster contract signing, we have two main takeaways to consider.

Guaranteed money vs. undervalued contracts

For a while now, it made a heck of a lot of sense for star players to lock in for the long-term and guarantee money. And, really, that may continue to be true given the injury risk that comes with playing hockey. But consider this: it took the salary cap 10 years (2013-14 to 2023-24) to increase by $19.2 million. Now, we’re looking at the prospect of the upper limit increasing from today’s $95.5 million to a projected $113.5 million in 2027-28 — an $18-million jump in just two years. It may climb even higher than that by 2027, and certainly will continue going up beyond that season.

Will more players choose to do what Auston Matthews has done early in his career? The Maple Leafs captain signed separate four- and five-year deals in his prime that made him the second-highest and highest paid player at the time, and he’s still on track to earn one of the league’s most lucrative deals when his current contract expires in 2028 and he’s 30 years old.

Take a look at these recent long-term deals and how valuable they will begin to look as soon as next season. This shows what the percentage of the cap each deal will be next season, and what AAV that would equal relative to this season’s salary cap:

This shows a wide swath of star players — some who could push the upper limit, and others who wouldn’t. But each is a leading player in their NHL organizations and as those contracts age well beyond 2026-27, they’ll likely become more and more valuable as wages spike.

The other consideration: How will players in the middle of long-term deals feel making millions less than the comparable player across from them who just recently re-upped?

Will a player push for maximum percentage in this era?

Even with revenue sharing what it is, we have to wonder how high the salary cap needs to go before we start creeping back towards an era where certain teams can always spend to the cap, and others either have to pick their spots, or work within their own internal caps. It wasn’t unusual in recent years to see nearly half the league utilizing LTIR to stay under the cap, where today roughly half the league is beginning the season with at least $4.5 million in cap space. Teams already have more breathing room — what will that look like when the upper limit gets to $113.5 million? $120 million? Or more?

Time will tell the trickle-down effect a rising cap will have on mid-lineup and depth players, but superstars should have more room to maximize earnings. The most a player can make is 20 per cent of the cap, which no one has done since the very early days of this system when Brad Richards got that while the upper limit was $39 million.

Since Kaprizov set a new, recent benchmark for cap percentage as well, we have to wonder if someone else will push past that in the next few years.

Next season, Quinn Hughes and Cale Makar, both generation-defining defencemen in their primes, will set the market for their position. Nikita Kucherov will be in his early-30s, but also an interesting pending UFA. Macklin Celebrini and Ivan Demidov will be RFAs coming off their entry-level contracts with the potential to chase big dollars by then.

In 2028, Matthews will be up. So will Brady Tkachuk, who would be appealing to any team, and Zach Werenski could be looking for one last big payday on the heels of the previous season’s defencemen. If McDavid re-signs for short term in Edmonton this time around, what if he tests the market three years down the road?

And who knows which other players will emerge as stars by then.

How many of these players will end up with a higher AAV than Kaprizov’s brand new deal?

This new era is just getting started.

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