Auston Matthews' Next Contract Just Got a Lot More Expensive

The Auston Matthews next contract question is now a $20 million question

The Auston Matthews next contract conversation has been sitting quietly in the background of every Maple Leafs discussion for two years. Cale Makar just dragged it into the middle of the room. When Colorado handed its defenceman an eight-year, $163.2 million extension on Friday — a $20.4 million average annual value, the first contract in league history to clear $20 million — it did not just reprice defencemen. It repriced everybody, and it did so fourteen months before Toronto has to start negotiating with its franchise centre.

Here is the uncomfortable version. Matthews is signed through 2027-28 at $13.25 million. When he signed that deal in August 2023, it was the largest cap hit in hockey, ahead of Nathan MacKinnon's $12.6 million. Three years later it is not close to the top of the league, and by the time it expires it will look like a discount. That is good news for the Maple Leafs right up until the moment they have to replace it.

What Matthews is actually signed for

The contract is four years, $53 million, signed on August 23, 2023, with a $13.25 million cap hit running through the end of 2027-28. Matthews becomes an unrestricted free agent in the summer of 2028, the summer he turns 31.

Run the percentages, because percentages are what actually matter in a rising-cap league. Against this season's $104 million ceiling, $13.25 million is 12.7 per cent of the cap. Against the $113.5 million upper limit the NHL and NHLPA have already announced for 2027-28, it is 11.7 per cent. Makar's $20.4 million against that same 2027-28 number is 18 per cent. Macklin Celebrini is at $18.8 million in San Jose, Leo Carlsson at $18 million in Anaheim after the Ducks matched Philadelphia's offer sheet on July 9.

So the top of the market has moved from roughly 15 per cent of the cap to roughly 18. If Matthews' representatives ask for the same slice of the pie in 2028 that the league's best players are getting today, the number is north of $20 million per season. Not as a negotiating tactic. As the market rate.

July 1, 2027 is the date to circle

Players entering the final season of a contract become eligible to sign an extension on July 1. For Matthews, that is July 1, 2027 — ten months from now. The Maple Leafs will have played exactly one season under John Chayka and Jim Hiller before they have to decide what the second half of Matthews' career is worth to them.

That is not much runway. It means the 2026-27 season is not just a bounce-back year for a team that finished last in the Atlantic. It is an evaluation year with a nine-figure decision attached. Every game Matthews plays between October and April is evidence in a negotiation, and both sides know it.

The seven-year problem nobody is talking about

Here is the wrinkle that makes the Matthews file harder than the Makar file. Makar signed eight years. Matthews will not get eight years.

The new collective bargaining agreement ratified in July 2025 takes effect on September 16, 2026 and runs through September 15, 2030. Under it, a player re-signing with his current club can sign for a maximum of seven years; a player signing elsewhere as a free agent on or after July 1 is capped at six. Makar got his eighth year because he signed before the changeover. Matthews, extending in July 2027, will not have that option.

Shorter maximum term pushes AAV up, not down. Teams have historically bought term at a discount — the eighth year is what lets a club shave a million off the annual number. Take the eighth year away and the player's camp has one fewer thing to trade. A seven-year deal starting in 2028-29, when Matthews is 31, would run through his age-37 season. That is a contract every party in the room will have opinions about.

The case against paying him

Matthews has now had two consecutive seasons interrupted by injury. In 2025-26 he played 60 games, scored 27 goals and added 26 assists for 53 points, and missed the final 16 games of the year after MCL surgery. He put 227 shots on net. Those are good numbers for most players. They are not $20 million numbers, and they are not the numbers of the player who scored 69 goals in 2023-24.

Availability is the whole argument. A centre who plays 60 games at a $20 million cap hit is a franchise-limiting contract, no matter how good he is on the nights he dresses. Toronto has already lived through what happens when an enormous share of the cap is committed to a small group of forwards and the depth has to be assembled out of minimum-salary players and hope. That team finished 15th in the Eastern Conference.

There is also the roster in front of him. Gavin McKenna arrives on an entry-level contract. Easton Cowan is on one. Matthew Knies is signed at a number that already looks like a bargain. If the Leafs are going to be good in 2029, a meaningful chunk of that goodness will come from players who are cheap right now and will not be cheap then. Every dollar committed to a 31-year-old is a dollar unavailable to a 24-year-old.

The case for paying him anyway

And yet. You do not replace Auston Matthews. There is no free-agent market for a right-shot centre who scores at his rate, and there is no trade that returns one. The Leafs have spent a decade learning that the hard way with other positions.

The injuries are also, so far, structural rather than degenerative — knee and wrist problems, not a body breaking down from age. He is 28. Players who score at Matthews' rate at 28 tend to still be very good at 33, and the back end of a seven-year deal is a problem for a cap that will be well past $130 million by then. A contract that looks heavy in 2028 often looks fine by 2031 simply because the ceiling moved.

And the alternative is genuinely bleak. Letting Matthews walk in 2028 means Toronto's best forward is McKenna, its second-best is Knies or Nylander, and the club has $20 million of theoretical cap space and no one to spend it on. Cap space is not an asset in a league where nobody good reaches July 1.

What I would do

Start the conversation on July 1, 2027, and start it at seven years and $19 million. That is a real offer — a hair under the Makar line, comfortably above Celebrini, and roughly 15 per cent of a cap that will be pushing $120 million by the time it kicks in. It is also a number Toronto can build around, which $21 million is not.

If Matthews' camp will not go there, Chayka needs to know that in July 2027, not February 2028. A player with one year left and no extension is an asset with a clock on it, and the 2028 trade deadline would be the last moment to convert him into something. That is an ugly sentence to type about the best goal-scorer the franchise has ever had. It is also the job. Chayka has already shown he will tell players where they stand directly, which is precisely the temperament this file will require.

What Toronto cannot do is drift. The last front office let the Mitch Marner situation reach its final year without resolution and ended up moving him in a sign-and-trade to Vegas, where he signed for eight years and $96 million and led the 2026 playoffs in scoring. Whatever you think of how that turned out for either side, nobody would describe it as a plan.

What's next

Matthews' health through training camp is the first checkpoint, and Toronto has been unusually quiet about it. Beyond that, watch what the Makar deal does to the contracts signed behind it — Quinn Hughes in Minnesota, and whatever number the next elite forward extension lands on. Each one is a data point Matthews' agent gets to cite.

The Leafs' full commitment picture is on our contracts page, and it is worth studying with 2028 in mind rather than 2027. Toronto's cap sheet is tight now and gets tighter the moment the biggest line item on it comes up for renewal. Friday's news in Denver did not create that problem. It just told everyone exactly how big it is going to be.