This offseason alone, the Carolina Hurricanes have signed three different players to eight-year deals (Logan Stankoven, K'Andre Miller and Jackson Blake).

Perhaps that's partly due to CBA changes that are coming down the pipe in a few seasons, but if you go back two years, that number still doubles to six on players who the team has handed out the max term allowable to (Sebastian Aho, Jaccob Slavin and Seth Jarvis).

So it seems like more of a calculated approach then a mad dash to beat the clock.

What's happening here is that the Canes are betting big on their young, blossoming talent and they're hoping it's a maneuver that gives them an edge moving forward.

With the salary cap set for an exponential climb over the next few years, contract values are going to balloon alongside it.

So securing deals now inherently saves money in the long run.

In total, the Hurricanes have 12 players who are signed for at least four more seasons, accounting for 65% of their total scoring from last season, and those players have an average age of just 26 years old.

The team, as a whole, is positioned well to keep future costs down and to maximize their current window.

According to JFresh Hockey, the Canes' seven longest running deals (including the Nikolaj Ehlers, six-year signing this offseason) will account for less than 50% of the team's total cap hit (44% to be exact) as soon as the 2027-28 season, and that number will only get smaller and smaller as the years go by.

What this means is that a lot of money is going to be freed up, allowing the team to be aggressive in pursuing more talent to supplement the core they've already locked in.

Is there risk with signing players, some of them with very limited experience, to these deals? Of course, but the team believes that these risks will work out more in their favor in the long run.

"We have a bunch of these [long-term deals] now and we're sort of the opinion that if we can kind of aggregate that risk and have a lot of players who we're comfortable making bets on — yeah, maybe for one or two of them, something's going to go wrong — but on the whole, we're going to come out ahead by staying aggressive and putting ourselves in a position to get things done and keep our core locked up and leave ourselves room to keep adding around them," said Carolina general manager Eric Tulsky.

Tulsky also said that signing these deals now also moves some of the risk and worry off of the players and puts it on the team instead.

While we've all seen how some players perform on the last year of a deal, the ol' contract year bump, there's also been plenty of players who have seen worse results due to the stress of playing for a contract.

The way the Canes are operating could mitigate the stress on not only the team, who knows what the roster will look like for the foreseeable future, but also on the players, who just have to worry about playing hockey.

"Doing it early, it's a little bit of transfer of risk from the player to the team," Tulsky said. "All the risk that he gets hurt, that something goes wrong, whatever, it's all our risk instead of his and that's something that is helpful to a player who only has one career and only one contract."

The Hurricanes, as an organization, like to think outside of the box, and this is just another example of the things they're trying to do to get a leg up on the competition.

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