Cale Makar Has Three Weeks Left to Sign an Eight-Year Deal and Colorado Has Not Started the Clock

Cale Makar has been eligible to sign a contract extension with Colorado since July 1 and has not signed one. He enters 2026-27 in the final season of the six-year, $54 million deal he signed in 2021, carrying a $9 million cap hit that is now dramatically below his market value. Under the new collective bargaining agreement between the NHL and the NHLPA, the maximum term for a player re-signing with his own team drops from eight years to seven on September 16.

That is the deadline nobody is talking about, and it is three weeks away. If Makar wants the eight-year term that only his own team can offer, and there has been no indication he does not, the window closes in the middle of next month.

The market that moved underneath him

Makar's $9 million cap hit was a fair number in 2021. It is not a fair number now, and the reason is that this offseason blew up every reference point in the league.

Macklin Celebrini signed at $18.8 million. Leo Carlsson signed the richest deal in league history via a Philadelphia offer sheet at north of $18 million annually, a contract that reset expectations for every young, productive restricted free agent in the league. Connor Bedard is at $15 million. Those are forwards, and forwards have historically been paid ahead of defensemen, but the gap between $9 million and those numbers is far wider than any positional adjustment justifies for a player of Makar's standing.

Colorado general manager Joe Sakic has made clear he expects Makar to spend his entire career with the Avalanche. That is almost certainly how this ends. But "almost certainly" and "signed" are different things, and the term structure gives both sides a reason to move before the middle of September rather than after.

Why it has not happened

The most likely explanation is straightforward: both sides are working out where the number lands in a market that has not stopped moving. Every large contract signed this summer changed the comparables, and an agent negotiating for the best defenseman in hockey has had every incentive to wait for the market to finish resetting before committing to a figure.

The complication is that Quinn Hughes is in a similar position, and the two of them anchor each other. Neither camp wants to sign first and discover the other set a higher bar. That kind of standoff resolves when a deadline forces it, and September 16 is the deadline.

Fantasy fallout

Makar's fantasy value in 2026-27 is unaffected by any of this in the sense that he will play, and he will play enormous minutes on the top power play unit for a team that scores. He is the first defenseman off the board in essentially every format and should be drafted as such.

What the contract situation creates is a narrative risk that fantasy managers should explicitly ignore. Contract-year defensemen do not underperform. If anything, the historical pattern for elite players in walk years is neutral to slightly positive, because the incentive structure points toward production. Anyone downgrading Makar over uncertainty is making the wrong adjustment.

The genuine fantasy angle is the one further down the roster. A Colorado team that eventually commits $14 million or more per season to one defenseman is a team with less money for depth, and that math starts to bite in future seasons rather than this one. Dynasty managers holding Colorado's secondary pieces should understand that the roster around Makar and Nathan MacKinnon is going to get thinner, not thicker.

The Verdexed model take

Our cap model projects that a Makar extension lands well north of any defenseman contract currently on the books, and that the difference between an eight-year deal signed before September 16 and a seven-year deal signed after is worth real money in annual average value. Shorter maximum term generally pushes the annual number up, because a player giving up a year of guaranteed security prices it into the cap hit.

That has a direct consequence for Colorado's projected competitive window. Our model treats an eight-year deal at a slightly lower cap hit as meaningfully better for the Avalanche's ability to keep a contending roster together than a seven-year deal at a higher one, and it prices the difference at close to a full roster spot's worth of cap flexibility per season across the life of the contract.

On the team side, our Colorado projection for 2026-27 does not change either way. Makar plays this season regardless. The projections that change are the ones for 2027-28 and beyond, and dynasty leagues are the format where that matters.

Betting angle

There is no direct market on this, but the indirect one is Colorado's Stanley Cup price. A franchise defenseman entering a walk year without an extension is a small negative signal for a team's medium-term outlook and no signal at all for the current season.

The more useful application is to season-long team futures generally. Markets do not price contract certainty, and teams with unresolved star contracts sometimes trade differently at the deadline than teams without them. A Colorado front office that has not extended Makar by the trade deadline is a front office with less flexibility to add salary, which affects how aggressively the team can improve mid-season.

What's next

September 16 is the date. Watch for movement in the first two weeks of the month, because that is when deals that need an eight-year term get done.

If the deadline passes without a signature, it does not mean Makar is leaving. It means the eventual contract will be seven years at a higher annual number, and it means Colorado will spend the season answering questions about it. For fantasy purposes, draft him first among defensemen and stop thinking about it. For dynasty purposes, the terms of this contract will shape Colorado's roster for the rest of the decade, and the difference between signing before and after the middle of September is larger than it looks.