Stars Sign Sam Steel To Four-Year Deal

The Dallas Stars have signed Sam Steel to a four-year contract that will pay him $3.7MM annually, the team announced.

Steel’s new contract will kick in for the 2027-28 season and will expire in 2031, when he’ll turn age 33. By then, Steel will be a UFA and have made $14.8MM over that time frame.

“We couldn’t be happier to extend Sam,” said Stars GM Jim Nill. “His consistency during his time with our team, especially on the penalty kill, plus his versatility has made him a valuable asset to our organization, and we’re happy to be locking him up for the next four seasons.”

This contract gives the 28-year-old forward a slight bump in annual pay. He is currently entering his fourth season, and is in the last season of a two-year contract that pays him $2.1MM AAV. He ended his 2025-26 season scoring 12 goals for 33 points in 73 games. 

Since Steel joined Dallas in 2023 in free agency, he’s totaled 27 goals for 82 points in 229 games, good for ninth in scoring among Stars forwards within that span. Known as a solid depth player, Steel leads the Stars forward group in penalty kill ice-time with a little over 450 minutes on the PK, 170 more minutes of shorthanded ice time than teammate Radek Faksa (279:25).

Through that reliability for a contending Stars team, including scoring 12 of his 14 playoff points in their two runs to the Western Conference Finals in 2024-25, Steel is now locked into the lengthiest contract of his professional career, as well as the most lucrative, since he turned pro.

The Alberta native, before his time with the Stars, played with the Minnesota Wild on a one-year contract and before that, spent four years with his original draft club, the Anaheim Ducks, who selected him 30th overall in the 2016 NHL Draft. His ability to be a sub-20-point producer earned him many short-term contracts; four one-year contracts to be exact, between his three teams up until 2024-25. But his career-high’s this past campaign solidified the role he can provide for Dallas for years to come.

Contrary to the Stars’ current cap space, which is around $390K in 2026-27, Dallas boasts around $39MM to work with this upcoming offseason, with inking Steel to his extension. A good piece of business, but the stars still have many other expiring contracts to evaluate, including Jason Robertson, Tyler Seguin, Joel Kiviranta, as well as defenders Tyler Myers and Lian Bichsel, who will be an RFA after his age 22 season, among others, to negotiate new deals.