2025 NHL Free Agent Final Contract Predictions

May 28, 2025

Welcome to my 2025 NHL contract predictions, the final draft. The Stanley Cup final is coming soon, which means the opening of free agency is also nigh. This is the 3^rd iteration posted on the blog, first one year ago, second mid-season, final using the full season stats. My preliminary 2026 list is already up on the blog, featuring one Connor McDavid. The trickiest part of trying to land on a final price tag for all these assets is projected cap increases, expected to hit $113M by 2028. I’m projecting 2% growth after that. If you’re signing a young gun for 8 years, you’ll need to juice the price to reflect those increases. But a 1-year deal is priced at a $95.5 cap. Ergo, cap hits on longer term deals will have an escalating number, especially if you’re buying UFA years.

I’m all set up now with new contract report cards, which I’ll preview below, so that we can grade and review new deals as they’re signed. The next blog post coming after this one will be “vote for NHL best contract round one” followed by a worst contract vote a few days later. These are open to all free subscribers. I’ll be posting a few hundred contract report cards in Substack chat, which includes a thread for free subscribers. In past summers I’d run a Twitter poll tournament to elect best and worst contracts. It was a fun way to pass the summer while free agency fully blooms. That was before dwindling Twitter audience. Now we’ll have the polls in Substack posts. Round 1 will have 8 polls featuring 40 contracts. 20 deals have a bye to round 2.

I’m offering a summer sale on annual memberships for $69 Canadian, which is 25% off the normal annual rate, and nearly 40% off the monthly rate. There’s tons of content coming, and it also guarantees you entry into my subscriber fantasy league(s) in September. You’ll also get early access to 2 bets on every single game next season. 75% of my picks will be going out exclusively to paid subscribers. A few of you have already purchased a full year, so I’m guaranteed an audience in the VIP threads for the next 365 days. There will also be a bunch of betting blog posts only going out to the VIPs. Most of my fantasy content will remain free, aside from a VIP chat thread where I post extra thoughts and invitations to join me in the mock draft lobby before the season.

Enough with the sales pitch, let’s get back to contracts. Taylor Hall was the first off the factory floor for “unsigned” deals, which was signed a month ago, but had not been added to my contracts DB yet. It’s set up now so that I can export players from my contract prediction worksheet to create new entries in my contracts DB, complete with forecasting and value grades. These will help inform your vote in the tournament, though this particular Taylor Hall treaty won’t be featured in either election. He finished pretty damn close to my prediction. There are some older contracts where I never made a prediction because the extension was signed early. That’s why I started predicting a year out (first time last summer).

A few observations about the 2025 list. Bennett can get way more but I’m pricing a hometown tax-free discount. If Tavares reaches the open market, he’ll get offered something north of $7.25M, but there’s a reasonable chance he’ll take less to stay in Toronto. Same with Duchene, who really undersold himself on the last one, producing an extreme outlier in my model recalibration (see chat thread). The goalie market is already slim pickings. I might not even go to the trouble of making new contract report cards for goalies. My modelling dislikes most of the new goalie contracts but I’m not declaring any of them bad at this time. Saros is on the bad deal watchlist. I’ll give him a chance to bounce back.