Jonathan Huberdeau’s Contract Isn’t Hurting the Flames

At the end of July, The Athletic released a list of their top 10 worst NHL contracts (from ‘Dom Luszczyszyn: NHL’s 10 worst contracts, 2025 edition: Jonathan Huberdeau, Ivan Provorov and more,’ The Athletic, 7/31/25). Featured as first billing on that list was the contract of Calgary Flames forward Jonathan Huberdeau, who was signed to an eight-year contract worth $10.5 million annually, beginning in the 2023-24 season and has six years left on his deal. This is not an ideal situation for the Calgary Flames, who plan on contending for the Stanley Cup sooner rather than later, but how bad actually is it?

Flat Cap Math

Most years, the NHL salary cap is projected to rise at a relatively steady percentage from the year before, ensuring that players get paid steadily more and more over time. The specific dollar amount rarely actually matters to most teams (since your average – and even your below-average – NHL team can afford to spend to the cap) and instead the value of a player is represented by a percentage of the salary cap. In order for the players (who do care about the money) to maximize their earnings, they sign contracts that look expensive up front but whose value as a percentage of the cap decreases as time goes on.

Or, at least, that’s the idea. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the NHL froze the salary cap almost in place and it rose either not at all or in very small increments. This raised the pressure on teams to play to the cap a lot more carefully – almost all contending teams, plus a great deal of teams that weren’t contending — spent to the salary cap. One bad contract in the flat cap era could take a team from a contender to a pretender.

Take, for example, the Toronto Maple Leafs. They signed the contracts of the “Core Four” – Auston Matthews, William Nylander, John Tavares, and Mitch Marner – to four large contracts before the salary cap flattened, under the assumption it would continue to rise. It didn’t, and during the seasons that followed they had to limit themselves to extremely weak depth, slow defencemen, and cheap goaltending, resulting in almost zero playoff success. If the salary cap had risen over that period of time, those contracts would have become less consequential.

Sticker Shock

Now, the NHL is back to the way that it was before the salary cap was flattened. After years of stagnating, the cap jumped from $88 million to $95.5 million this offseason after only rising by $6.5 million, total, since the 2019-20 season. That’s a single-year jump greater than the past six seasons combined — made even more dramatic by the fact that $4.5 million of that $6.5 million was allotted in the offseason of 2024. This leaves almost every team in the league with a huge amount of cap space, even many teams that were tight to the cap before it started rising again.

This can leave the league and its fans with a kind of reverse sticker-shock: for the COVID years and those following, the salary cap was assumed to be a certain steady number, so all contracts and analyses were done with the assumption that the cap would be at a certain dollar level and would remain that way. Perspectives had shifted to look at the league’s salary structure in a certain way.

However, the league is past that structure now, and our perspectives need to reverse to the way that they were before the cap flattened: dollar values and cap percentage must be divorced once again. This means contracts are going to look rich, even if two years in they’ll be reasonable.

The Flames’ Cap Concerns (or Lack Thereof)

Huberdeau’s contract is not going to be reasonable in two years. It will probably be unreasonable for its duration, unless he makes a big turnaround and goes back to the form that nearly won him a Hart Trophy. There’s a reason it topped the “worst contracts” list.