The NHL spent the summer of 2026 handing out money like Oprah was in charge of the salary cap. You get a crazy contract! You get a crazy contract! You get an even crazier contract!
Leo Carlsson kicked it all off by signing an offer sheet at $18 million a season, then Macklin Celebrini bumped him at $18.8 million, then Cale Makar topped them both with a record $20.4 million and became the first $20-million man in league history. The highest-paid title changed hands so often you practically needed a live ticker to keep up. Remember when Connor McDavid re-signed with Edmonton a year ago for a piddly-by-comparison $12.5 million, a deep discount he took to keep the Oilers’ Cup window open? Now, he’s applauding these record deals saying they were “a long time coming for our league.”
Montreal opens the 2026-27 season in Toronto on Sept. 29 with basically the same roster that forced its way to the Eastern Conference Final last spring. Martin St-Louis got a multi-year extension, Josh Anderson got an official “A,” and Kent Hughes spent most of the summer doing something that looked remarkably boring by comparison to the rest of the league.
He kept his best players. At numbers that suddenly look like bargains.
Ivan Demidov got eight years at $9.15 million per season. Jakub Dobes got three years at $5.35 million. Alex Newhook, who led Montreal with seven playoff goals, signed for four years at $5.55 million. When everyone else went shopping, Hughes went to his closet and decided what he already owned was pretty darn good.
None of which means Montreal is scrounging the bargain bin for lack of talent. Far from it. This is a roster with a 100-point captain in Nick Suzuki, a bona fide sniper in Cole Caufield, and Lane Hutson, the 2024-25 season’s rookie of the year, running the show from the back end. Add Juraj Slafkovsky filling out into a power forward, and Ivan Demidov, who led every rookie in the league in scoring last season, and the core isn’t just intact, it’s still climbing.
The wager is that chemistry compounds, and a team that already knows itself can go further by staying together than by reshuffling the deck. Montreal’s young core has already been through a playoff run. Now Hughes is betting that another year together, with another year of development, is worth more than whatever shiny new piece he could have gone shopping for. The question heading into this season isn’t whether Montreal has enough talent to compete. It’s whether this group can take the next step without the kind of major addition everyone seemed to be seeking this summer.
Suzuki’s been making the argument to anyone holding a microphone: the returning group has the advantage because the guys know each other and they’re comfortable in the system. He credits the tight-knit bonds and inclusive room they’ve built over the years. Convenient spin from a captain, sure, except the people around him keep saying it too. Continuity is a lovely word for deciding you don’t need to change much, and every team that passes on getting better swears the room is enough, right up until a hungrier, deeper opponent shows up and proves it wasn’t. Montreal hasn’t won anything yet. A young team relying on internal growth doesn’t automatically get better. It can just as easily get passed by the clubs that spent the summer improving.
What makes Montreal’s approach interesting is that the cap puts a premium on finding value. Every GM shelling out $18 million a year for one player is using a huge chunk of a finite pie. The Canadiens are playing the opposite game, using their cap space to keep their core players together at numbers that still leave room to build around them. There’s no cap line for chemistry, and no rival can match the value of a group that already knows how to play together.
Of course, the group isn’t kidding itself that friendship and a strong culture alone hangs a banner. Watching the Carolina Hurricanes put them out last spring, Suzuki came away fixated on how connected the Hurricanes were across every line and pairing, and said plainly that Montreal has to get more focused and accountable to live in that neighbourhood.
Eighty-four games will settle it. While the rest of the league spent the summer trying to buy its way up the standings, Hughes needed to decide whether the team he already had was worth betting on and he made his answer pretty clear. Now the Canadiens have to prove he was right.
