MONTREAL — The selection of Juraj Slafkovsky first overall in the 2022 NHL Draft was announced in Montreal, in front of a home crowd, and the cheers were complicated. Shane Wright was still available. So was Logan Cooley. Several scouts had also ranked Slafkovsky fourth or fifth on their internal lists. The Canadiens selected him anyway, and the debate began before he had even unpacked his bags.
Four years later, Slafkovsky has given that debate a clearer shape. He is 22 and plays left wing with the combination of size and skill that represented Montreal’s primary theoretical gamble. During the 2025-26 season, he recorded 74 points in 78 games alongside Nick Suzuki as the Canadiens reached the playoffs for the first time in five years. The selection looks different now than it did on draft night. The paperwork confirming that change has five days to be completed.
The Canadiens have not announced an extension.
General manager Kent Hughes has approached the rebuild with particular patience. He did not rush Suzuki’s extension, nor did he accelerate negotiations with Lane Hutson after Hutson emerged as Montreal’s best defenseman. Hughes has consistently resisted overpaying in years or dollars simply to complete a deal before the market required it. That strategy has served Montreal well. Whether it applies to Slafkovsky in the same way it applied to depth players is a different question.
Slafkovsky is not a depth player. He is the justification for the strategy.
What Slafkovsky’s numbers have done in two full NHL seasons is make the range of likely outcomes legible. He is not producing at the top end of this generation of forwards; Michkov in Philadelphia has outpaced him. But he is firmly in the second tier, and the Montreal media market prices that tier higher than markets elsewhere do. Le Journal de Montréal has tracked the extension negotiations daily since August. Radio-Canada has run projections. The Bell Centre faithful have their own number in mind, and it is probably higher than what Kent Hughes is prepared to offer.
That gap, if it exists, is the only story worth tracking this week.
The leverage in this negotiation sits with both sides simultaneously. The Canadiens have the right to keep Slafkovsky on a bridge contract through next season, walk him through arbitration, and sign him after September 15 to seven years, still a long commitment and still more expensive in the seventh year than it would be now, as Yahoo Sports detailed in its breakdown of the new CBA terms that take effect Monday. Slafkovsky’s camp knows that, and they also know that Montreal’s rebuild lives or dies on whether he and Suzuki are in red and white together for the next decade. The team does not hold leverage over the player the way it might over a bubble roster piece. They hold leverage over each other, which is almost the same as no leverage at all.
The $18-to-$20 million corridor, where this extension likely lands based on comparable signings across the league, represents roughly 22 percent of the projected 2026-27 salary cap for a single player. That is the number Slafkovsky’s camp will be pushing toward, or at minimum signaling proximity to. The Canadiens have the cap room to absorb it. Whether Hughes is willing to commit that percentage of his cap structure to a player who has delivered exactly one true breakout season, rather than two or three, is not a public record.
What is public is that Slafkovsky arrived in Montreal for training camp last week ahead of schedule. He did not have to. Players managing uncertain contract situations often manage their visibility carefully. Showing up early in a hockey market that has not stopped talking about his extension for three months is not an accident. It is something a player does when he wants to stay.
The question no one in Montreal has publicly answered this week is whether wanting to stay and being signed to stay are the same thing yet.
Shane Wright scored 71 points in Seattle last season. Logan Cooley scored 68 in Utah before securing his eight-year deal. Slafkovsky scored 74 in Montreal. Those three lines of a box score do not settle the 2022 draft debate; Bleacher Report graded the round of extensions across this class and found the valuations wide. But they suggest the debate is less interesting than it was. Montreal took the right player, or something close enough to the right player that the margin no longer supports the certainty with which critics said they were wrong.
What that margin definitely does not support is leaving the extension unsigned past Monday.
Five days from now, Montreal can still sign Slafkovsky to seven years. But seven years is not eight years, and in a market where the most scrutinized player on the team has already endured four years of debate about whether he deserved to be there at all, the length of the contract is not merely a financial decision. It is a statement. Eight years says: we were right, we know we were right, and we are done litigating it.
Montreal has five days to make that statement. In the Bell Centre, they know what they have. They just need to sign it.
