Flames sign goaltender Dustin Wolf to seven year extension ($7.5 million AAV)

The Calgary Flames have locked up arguably their single most important player for a long, long awhile.

On Tuesday morning, the Flames announced they’ve signed goaltender Dustin Wolf to a seven year contract extension with a $7.5 million average annual value. The deal begins in 2026-27 and runs until the end of the 2032-33 season, and expires just after Wolf’s 32nd birthday. It’s a pretty hefty raise on his current $850,000 cap hit, which runs through this season, and covers five potential free agent seasons for Wolf.

A product of Gilroy, California that grew up cheering for the San Jose Sharks, Wolf emerged as a really strong netminder as he worked his way through California minor hockey. He landed with the Western Hockey League’s Everett Silvertips in 2017-18 as Carter Hart’s backup. Since then, he’s done two things: put up impressive numbers, and gotten doubters asking whether he could keep it up against top competition given he’s listed at just 6’0″, considered short for a goalie.

Guess what? He’s kept doing it.

Wolf won 41 games and posted a 1.69 goals against average and .936 save percentage in 2018-19, his draft year, and was selected 214th overall (fourth-from-last) in the 2019 NHL Draft. He proceeded to win the Western League’s goalie of the year award in the next two seasons, then won the American League’s goalie of the year award in the two seasons after that. He was the AHL’s most valuable player in 2022-23, too.

After spending some time in the NHL in 2023-24, he became a full-time NHLer in 2024-25 after the trade of Jacob Markstrom to New Jersey. He proceeded to get the offensively-challenged Flames to within a tiebreaker of the playoffs, finishing as runner-up for the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s top rookie and receiving votes for the Vezina Trophy as top goaltender and Hart Trophy as player most valuable to his team.

Simply put: yeah, this is a pretty unprecedented contract for a young netminder with just one full NHL campaign under his belt. But Wolf has established himself as a pretty unprecedented goaltender, so it seems to fit. He’s a really good goaltender and a really important player for what the Flames feel like they’re building.

And he’s under contract until he’s 32.