DENVER — No one had paid a defenseman $20 million a year to play hockey. Then the Colorado Avalanche decided Cale Makar was the player worth doing it for the first time.
Colorado signed Makar to an eight-year, $163.2 million extension on Friday, carrying a $20.4 million average annual value that exceeds any contract in NHL history at any position. The deal runs through the 2034-35 season and takes effect in 2027-28, when his current six-year contract, signed in 2021 at a $9 million annual hit, expires.
The timing was deliberate. A new collective bargaining agreement takes effect September 15 that caps player contracts at a maximum of seven years. Makar’s extension runs eight. Colorado got the deal signed with three weeks to spare, locking in a term length that no player will be able to replicate under the CBA’s new rules.
Makar said Friday he “couldn’t be more excited to continue my journey here with the Avalanche in this amazing city of Denver,” the kind of statement that fits a press conference backdrop. What it doesn’t quite capture is the financial statement Colorado made around it: that Makar is worth more than any defenseman the NHL has ever paid, and more than any player at any position in the sport’s history.
The deal displaces Kirill Kaprizov of the Minnesota Wild as the richest contract in league history. Kaprizov signed an eight-year, $136 million agreement in September 2025, a record that lasted less than twelve months. Macklin Celebrini of the San Jose Sharks, who agreed to a five-year, $94 million extension this summer at $18.8 million annually, is now second in per-year value to Makar, per Yahoo Sports.
Part of what makes the gap between Makar and Kaprizov instructive is its size. Makar’s deal is $27.2 million richer in total value. That is not the kind of margin that typically separates consecutive league records. What Colorado did Friday wasn’t an incremental adjustment to an existing ceiling. It was a different argument about what kind of money an elite defenseman, playing at this level, has earned the right to command.
The case for the number rests on a career that backs it. Makar enters the extension with 136 goals, 371 assists, and 507 points as a Colorado defenseman, all franchise records at his position. He has won the Norris Trophy twice. When the Avalanche won the Stanley Cup in 2022, he took home the Conn Smythe as playoff MVP. At 27, he is entering the stretch of his career where elite players at his position have historically performed at their highest sustained levels.
Those credentials don’t settle the harder question the deal raises. The 2022 championship happened with Makar on a $9 million cap hit, a number that allowed Colorado to simultaneously carry Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen, and Valeri Nichushkin on the same roster. The math at $20.4 million is meaningfully different, and the Avalanche already made one significant adjustment to accommodate it.
Colorado traded Nichushkin to the Columbus Blue Jackets for draft picks earlier this summer, a move that sits within a broader NHL defenseman market where teams have spent the offseason restructuring rosters to accommodate the sport’s rising salary commitments. Nichushkin had scored at least 20 goals in each of the past three seasons. His departure is the most visible cost of building around a $20.4 million cap number, and it is unlikely to be the last adjustment the organization makes.
The contract will also reset what the next wave of elite defensemen expects in their own negotiations. As NBC Sports reported Friday, Quinn Hughes and Zach Werenski are among the defensemen whose contract timelines now run into a market where $20.4 million exists as a ceiling and a reference point. Their negotiations will not start from where the NHL’s defensive salary floor was two years ago. They will start from where Colorado just put it, reshaping the NHL free agency market for elite defensive players in ways that go well beyond one franchise’s roster decisions.
For Colorado, the logic behind this extension is the same logic that has defined every major roster decision the franchise has made since Makar arrived: identify the player the team cannot succeed without, and structure everything else around keeping him. The question the Avalanche cannot answer today is whether that structure produces another Stanley Cup at $20.4 million per year, or whether the constraints it creates make the next championship harder to reach.
Eight seasons will provide the answer. For now, Makar is the highest-paid player in NHL history, Colorado has committed to building its future around that fact, and the number that had never appeared in the sport before, $20 million per year for a defenseman, will not look like an outlier for long.
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