The Athletic's yearly top-10 contract list is out and a Montreal Canadiens' player tops hit this time around.
Every year, The Athletic’s Dom Luszczyszyn releases his NHL’s 10 best contracts list, and this time around, it’s a Montreal Canadiens player contract that takes the cake. The deal GM Kent Hughes signed with Lane Hutson on October 13, 2025, is looking better by the minute in a market where the salary cap is set to keep rocketing up.
This season, the salary cap is set at $104 million, and the Habs’ ace defenseman will only have an $8.85 M cap hit all the way through the end of the 2034 season. Luszczyszyn’s model of contract evaluation is not based on what a player has done so far, but rather on what they will do in the future. He explains that the goal is to grade contracts empirically, with the same context applied to each player in the league: how much value does each player bring to the table per year and over the life of the contract.
Given Hutson’s spectacular progression in his two years in the league, Luszczyszyn projects that if he continues on his current trajectory, his top comparables are Cale Makar, Adam Fox and Quinn Hughes; what Hutson provides should be worth 16 to 18 percent of the cap. That would work out to about $25 million against a $150 million salary cap. That’s a figure that’s still some way away in the future, but it’s no doubt coming.
Hughes is set to become a UFA at the end of the season, just like Makar. The former currently has a $7.85 million cap hit while the latter’s stands at $9 million; those figures are set to explode and will make Hutson’s cap hit seem ludicrous, and in a good way. As for Adam Fox, he has a $9.5 million cap hit on a 7-year deal which he signed in November 2021. That’s four whole years before Hutson put pen to paper on his deal.
According to Luszczyszyn’s model, Hutson left about $100 million on the table when he committed to the Canadiens for eight years at such a low cap hit. That’s the only Canadiens contract that has made the top 10 for this season, and I’ll admit I was a bit surprised not to see Ivan Demidov’s contract land on the list as well, but I think that’s down to the projection of his impact on the team not yet being where it should be. The league has only seen one season of the Russian star, and it will soon realize just how productive and important to the Canadiens’ lineup he is not only right now but will be in the future as well.
Jake Sanderson, Brandon Hagel, Jackson Blake, Moritz Seider, Logan Thompson, Seth Jarvis, Dustin Wolf, Rasmus Dahlin and Jack Hughes complete The Athletic’s list of the league’s top 10 contracts.
Back in 2022, none other than Nick Suzuki landed on Luszczyszyn's list of worst contracts in the league, believe it or not. The captain’s upward trajectory wasn’t foreseen by the model, or to be honest, by a lot of people, especially outside of the Montreal market. A general manager’s job is definitely not easy, as putting a figure on how much the services of the players will be worth in the future is a shot in the dark; there are so many unknowns at so many levels. A player’s performance can be influenced by injuries, by the way the team around him performs, by their personal circumstances; the list is endless. Still at this stage, the deal Hughes signed Demidov as the makings of a work of art.
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