Team

Betting

CanucksArmy has no direct affiliation to the Vancouver Canucks, Canucks Sports & Entertainment, NHL, or NHLPA

Buium’s extension with Canucks looks even better after Luneau’s extension with Ducks

Photo credit: Bob Frid-Imagn Images

By Jeffrey Kennett

Oct 3, 2026, 11:00 EDTUpdated: Oct 3, 2026, 02:06 EDT

Comments

There are aggressive bets on young players, and then there is handing $43.2 million to a defenceman who has played 14 NHL games.

The Anaheim Ducks crossed that line Thursday, signing 22-year-old Tristan Luneau to a six-year extension carrying a $7.2 million average annual value beginning in 2027-28. According to Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman, it is the largest contract in NHL history for a player with only 14 games of experience.

Fourteen games. Two goals. Four points. Forty-three-point-two million dollars.

And somehow, one month after the Vancouver Canucks committed eight years and $75.04 million to Zeev Buium at a $9.38 million cap hit, Anaheim has managed to make Vancouver’s deal look considerably more shrewd.

This is not really about whether Luneau is good — he’s in the NHL, he probably is — but the Ducks clearly think he can be much more than that.

General manager Pat Verbeek called signing Luneau a priority and said Anaheim views him as a top-four defenceman for years to come. There is evidence behind the projection, too. Luneau produced 52 points in 59 AHL games in 2024-25 before adding 41 in 70 last season. His 93 points across those two years ranked among the best totals by an AHL defenceman.

His unusual development path includes a knee infection which wiped out the final 44 games of his 2023-24 season and prevented him from playing at the World Juniors. Anaheim subsequently took a patient approach, assigning him to AHL San Diego and largely leaving him there even as his production suggested he was moving closer to the NHL. He received only a one-game recall last season.

The Ducks clearly like the player, but it doesn’t make $43.2 million after 14 NHL games any less astonishing.

Buium suddenly looks like a safer bet

Consider what Vancouver bought for only $2.18 million more annually than the Ducks.

Buium had already played 76 NHL games when the Canucks extended him, more than five times Luneau’s total, but he only had 26 points, including 12 in 45 games after arriving in Vancouver.

Before turning pro, Buium built one of the stronger amateur resumes of any young defenceman in hockey.

The San Diego native scored 98 points in 83 games at the University of Denver, won an NCAA championship and was selected 12th overall in 2024. He also played for gold-medal American teams at the World Juniors in consecutive years.

At the time, $9.38 million sounded enormous for a 20-year-old with one full NHL season under his belt; however, a month later, the league is beginning to explain why Vancouver moved so quickly.

Instead of asking, “Is Buium worth $9.38 million right now?” we should probably be thinking, “What is $9.38 million going to mean three years from now?”

The denominator is changing

The NHL salary cap is $104 million this season and is already scheduled to rise to $113.5 million in 2027-28, when both the Buium and Luneau extensions begin.

Friedman reported last week that the NHL presented an initial estimate of $127.5 million for 2028-29 at its Board of Governors meeting. If that figure holds, it would be a $14-million jump in a single year and the largest increase of the salary-cap era.

Put Buium’s deal against those numbers and his $9.38 million hit would consume roughly 8.3% of a $113.5 million cap when the extension begins. If the ceiling reaches $127.5 million the following season, the same salary would represent about 7.4%.

That is the part of these contracts that can get lost when everyone stares at the raw dollar figure. The number is fixed, but the denominator is exploding.

What looks like superstar money based on the NHL economy fans grew accustomed to during the flat-cap years can gradually become ordinary top-four or top-pair money without the player receiving another dollar. And teams know it.

Anaheim is effectively saying it would rather risk overpaying Luneau today than discover what a legitimate young top-four defenceman costs after another $20-plus million has been added to the league’s spending ceiling.

When Pat Verbeek let Leo Carlsson reach restricted free agency in July, only for the Philadelphia Flyers to force the issue with a five-year, $90-million offer sheet, the GM acknowledged Anaheim never expected the number to climb that high. Whether Luneau’s extension is a direct reaction or not, it certainly looks like a front office determined not to be caught negotiating from someone else’s terms again.

That makes Ryan Johnson’s handling of Buium look even more polished: Vancouver identified its cornerstone, used the final window in which an eight-year extension was available and finished the deal before another team, or another round of market inflation, could dictate the price.

Friedman wrote in his tweet that the Ducks have learned to take care of their business before someone else does it for them. Vancouver appears to be operating from the same playbook.

Welcome to the NBA-ification of NHL contracts

This analogy has been referenced before, but it’s an accurate representation of what the NHL is currently going through.

In 2016, the NBA salary cap exploded from $70 million to roughly $94 million in one summer after the league’s new television contract kicked in. Suddenly, virtually everyone had spending room at once. Remind you of anything?

The Los Angeles Lakers gave Timofey Mozgov four years and $64 million just weeks after he had averaged 6.3 points and 4.4 rebounds for the Cleveland Cavaliers. His role had shrunk so dramatically during the Cavaliers’ championship run that he played just 25 total minutes in the seven-game NBA Finals. Yet there was Mozgov, $64 million richer.

Luol Deng received $72 million from the same Lakers. Ian Mahinmi also landed $64 million with the Washington Wizards. Allen Crabbe got $75 million from the Portland Trail Blazers. The numbers were ridiculous because everyone was still evaluating contracts against the NBA economy that had existed before the cap spike rather than the one teams expected afterward.

Some teams were right to spend aggressively, while others were simply wrong about the players.

Mozgov lasted one season in Los Angeles. The Lakers eventually attached former No. 2 overall pick D’Angelo Russell to him in a trade that functioned in large part as a salary dump, clearing the remaining money from their books. Deng’s deal went even worse. By 2017-18, he was effectively out of the Lakers’ rotation despite being healthy, appearing in only one game that entire season. Los Angeles bought him out the following summer and stretched part of the remaining cap charge through 2021-22.

The lesson was not that every giant contract signed during the cap spike was foolish, but that a rising cap made previously absurd salaries possible without making every player receiving one better.

Now we’re beginning to see that in the NHL.

The contract is no longer the player value

For years, hockey treated salary almost like a league-wide leaderboard.

An $11 million player (or $11.6) had to perform like an $11-million player. A $7 million defenceman was judged against the established $7 million class, and if someone landed far above his perceived place in the hierarchy, the contract immediately looked suspicious.

That logic cannot still be used when the market itself is moving this quickly.

Luneau is not suddenly a proven $7.2 million NHL defenceman because Anaheim put that number on a contract. The Ducks are paying for what they believe he will become and attempting to lock in tomorrow’s price before tomorrow arrives.

The same was true when Vancouver committed $9.38 million to Buium. Some of these bets will look brilliant, and others are going to age like Mozgov.

There is no mechanism in a rising-cap environment that guarantees the player develops simply because the league can afford to pay him more. Prospects still stall. Injuries happen. Players projected as top-pair defencemen become third-pair defencemen. Organizations will inevitably guarantee tens of millions based on development curves that never reach their expected destination.

The difference now is that teams appear willing to accept that risk and that standing still carries a price of its own.

Wait a year on the right player, and the comparable that once cost $7 million might cost $9 million. Wait another season, and the cap could be $127.5 million; agents have a fresh collection of contracts to point toward, and the bargain disappears.

Vancouver guaranteed Buium a staggering amount of money before he had completed his second NHL season. Nothing about that is risk-free, and Buium still has to become the player the Canucks believe they acquired in the Quinn Hughes trade. But the market has already moved.

A player with 14 NHL games now costs $7.2 million. Buium has 76 games, a substantially stronger NHL track record, higher draft pedigree and two additional seasons locked into his extension for only $2.18 million more per year.

If this is what the NHL is becoming, the Canucks got their business done just in time.

Sponsored by bet365