Cale Makar Contract Resets the NHL Market — What It Costs Toronto

The Cale Makar contract, by the numbers

The Cale Makar contract is official, and it is the largest in the history of the National Hockey League. Colorado signed its franchise defenceman to an eight-year extension worth $163.2 million on Friday, an average annual value of $20.4 million that makes Makar the first player ever to cross the $20 million line. The deal begins in 2027-28 and runs through 2034-35, by which point Makar will be 36.

The total value is the headline. The AAV is the part that matters to every other team in the league, Toronto included. Until Friday, no NHL player had a cap hit that started with a two. Macklin Celebrini's five-year, $94 million deal with San Jose sat at the top at $18.8 million. Leo Carlsson, whose $18 million AAV came by way of Anaheim matching a Philadelphia offer sheet on July 9, was just behind. Makar cleared both by more than a million and a half dollars a season, and he did it as a defenceman.

That last detail is the one that should get a Maple Leafs fan's attention. The previous high-water mark for a blueliner was reportedly Bowen Byram's $12.5 million cap hit in Chicago. Makar did not nudge that number. He detonated it.

The 20 per cent ceiling stopped being theoretical

The collective bargaining agreement caps any individual player at 20 per cent of the league's upper limit. Against this season's $104 million ceiling, that maximum is $20.8 million. Makar's $20.4 million would have been 19.6 per cent of the cap this year — inside the rule, but only barely.

He does not have to live under this year's ceiling, though, and that is the clever part of the structure. The NHL and NHLPA have already announced a $113.5 million upper limit for 2027-28, with a lower limit of $83.9 million. Makar's deal starts that same season. At $113.5 million, his $20.4 million is 18 per cent of the cap — a big number, but not a franchise-breaking one, and one that shrinks in real terms every year the cap climbs afterward.

For a decade, the 20 per cent maximum was a piece of CBA trivia. Nobody was near it. The cap sat flat through the pandemic years, the top contracts clustered in the twelves and thirteens, and the ceiling was an abstraction. It is not an abstraction anymore. Four landmark deals in under a year — Carlsson, Celebrini, and now Makar, with Quinn Hughes still to come — have pulled the top of the market up toward a number the CBA actually enforces.

What this does to the Maple Leafs' blue line

Toronto's defence corps costs a lot and does not include anybody in Makar's neighbourhood. That is not a criticism of the players so much as a description of the situation. Darren Raddysh carries an $8.5 million cap hit. Morgan Rielly is at $7.5 million. Jake McCabe is at $4.51 million and Chris Tanev at $4.5 million. That is roughly $25 million committed to four defencemen who are all, at best, very good second-pairing players in a contender's structure. Add Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Troy Stecher and Emil Andrae and Toronto has seven bodies under contract and no answer to the question of who plays 24 minutes against the other team's best line in April.

Makar's contract makes the cost of solving that problem explicit. There is no longer any ambiguity about the price of a genuine number-one defenceman. It is $20 million and change, and it comes with eight years of term. John Chayka can build the blue line by committee, or he can pay the freight for one, and the freight has just been posted in public.

The uncomfortable arithmetic: Toronto's four highest-paid defencemen combined cost about $25 million. Makar alone will cost $20.4 million. Colorado is getting a Norris-calibre driver for roughly what Toronto is paying Raddysh, Rielly and McCabe together. That is not a spending problem. It is an allocation problem, and allocation problems are much harder to trade your way out of.

The cap sheet Toronto actually has

None of this is hypothetical for a team already pressed against the ceiling. PuckPedia currently projects the Maple Leafs at a $106.75 million cap hit against the $104 million upper limit — roughly $2.75 million over. That is survivable because clubs may exceed the ceiling by 10 per cent in the off-season, and because Max Domi is expected to open the year on long-term injured reserve. Toronto will be compliant on opening night. It will not be comfortable.

Compliant-but-tight is a manageable state in a season where the cap is about to rise $9.5 million. It is a much worse state if the plan requires adding a $20 million player at any point. Whatever flexibility the 2027-28 jump creates for Toronto, a meaningful slice of it is already spoken for by contracts the club has not signed yet — starting with the one at centre. You can follow the full commitment picture on our contracts page.

Quinn Hughes is next, and Toronto should care

The Makar deal did not just set a price. It set a floor for the negotiations that follow. Quinn Hughes, now in Minnesota after last season's blockbuster, is signed through 2026-27 and can become an unrestricted free agent after that. His camp, led by Pat Brisson, now has a target number in writing. Elliotte Friedman has reported that Hughes and the Wild have not been in regular contract discussions, which is the sort of detail that makes 30 other general managers sit up.

We wrote earlier this month that the $20 million defenceman was coming, and that Toronto had no realistic path to being the team that signed one. Makar's deal confirmed the first half of that. The second half looks even more true today than it did two weeks ago: a club carrying $25 million in existing defence commitments, an unresolved goaltending workload split, and a franchise centre approaching free agency does not get to bid at the top of the blue-line market. Not without dismantling something else first.

Matthew Schaefer is the third domino. The Islanders' Calder Trophy winner becomes eligible for his next contract after 2027-28, by which time Makar and, presumably, Hughes will have established the ceiling. One agent has already floated the idea that Schaefer, not Makar, ends up being the first $20 million player people remember. He was beaten to it by five days short of forever, but the point holds — the number goes up from here, not down.

Chayka's window got narrower and clearer at the same time

There is a version of this story that reads as pure bad news for Toronto, and it is not quite right. The Makar contract clarifies something the Maple Leafs have been fuzzy about for years: you cannot assemble a top defence pairing out of depth pieces and hope the aggregate works. The market has now priced that honestly. Chayka, who has spent his first full off-season rebuilding the roster from the middle outward, is at least operating with accurate information.

It also strengthens the case for the thing Toronto actually has, which is cheap high-end youth. Gavin McKenna is on an entry-level contract. Easton Cowan is on one too. In a league where the best players cost a fifth of the cap, three years of elite production at $950,000 is not a nice-to-have — it is the only mechanism by which a cap-strapped team creates real surplus value. The Leafs have two of those and should be extremely reluctant to spend either.

What's next

Watch Minnesota. If Hughes signs somewhere near $20.5 million, the ceiling holds and the top of the market settles into a band between $18 million and $21 million for the league's genuine best. If he pushes past Makar, every projection anybody has made about 2028 free agency needs redoing, Toronto's included.

Watch the cap announcements. The $113.5 million figure for 2027-28 is agreed, and league revenue growth has been strong enough that projections beyond it keep drifting upward — north of $120 million within two seasons and $130 million within three, by some estimates. Every dollar of that helps a team with big contracts on the books. It also helps the teams bidding against Toronto.

And watch the calendar. Training camp opens in a few weeks, the Prospect Challenge and pre-season schedule are set, and none of that changes because a defenceman in Denver signed a piece of paper. But the paper matters. The Maple Leafs now know exactly what the thing they are missing costs, and exactly how far they are from being able to afford it.