The $10 Million Macklin Celebrini Left On The Table All Comes Out Of 2031 And 2032
San Jose made a 20-year-old the highest-paid player in hockey, and he signed for less than the ceiling, which is the part that got printed. The year-by-year is the part that matters. The first three seasons pay exactly $20.8 million, which is the legal maximum, and 94.8 percent of the $94 million arrives as signing bonus.
The number worth writing down is $20,800,000, and it appears in Macklin Celebrini's new contract three times.
That is not a negotiation landing spot. Under the collective bargaining agreement, no individual contract may pay a player more than 20 percent of the league's upper limit, and the upper limit for the league year in which Celebrini signed is $104 million. Twenty percent of $104 million is $20.8 million. It is the ceiling, and there is nothing above it. (No bonus structure, no creative term, no clause gets a player past it. Twenty percent is twenty percent.)
The first three years of the extension pay it to the dollar.
Here is the whole deal, because almost nobody printed it: $950,000 in base salary plus a $19.85 million signing bonus in 2027-28. The same again in 2028-29. Then $1 million plus $19.8 million in 2029-30. Add those and you get $20.8 million, $20.8 million, $20.8 million. Then it steps down. Year four pays $17.1 million. Year five pays $14.5 million.
Five years, $94 million, an $18.8 million cap hit, and he is the highest-paid player in the sport. (He turned 20 in June. The contract does not start paying him until he is 21.)
Now do the counterfactual properly, since this is the part where the reporting went soft. A five-year contract at the maximum would have paid $104 million. Celebrini signed for $94 million. So the discount is real, and it is exactly $10 million, and here is where it lives: $3.7 million of it comes out of the 2030-31 season and $6.3 million comes out of 2031-32.
Not one dollar of it comes out of the next three years.
You can hold two things in your head at once here, and you have to, because the version where a kid takes a hometown discount so his general manager can build a winner is true and also about six percent of the story. What Celebrini gave up is cap room, $2 million a year of it, which is genuine and which Mike Grier will genuinely spend. What he did not give up is money he sees soon.
And then there is the structure, which is the tell. Of the $94 million, $89.1 million is signing bonus. Base salary across all five seasons totals $4.9 million, which is less than the signing bonus he collects in any single year of the deal, including the cheapest one. Signing bonuses are paid in full on schedule regardless of what happens next, they survive a buyout, and they are the standard armor for players at this tier, so this is not sinister. It is an agent doing the job. But it does mean the phrase "team-friendly" is carrying weight it cannot hold. A deal is not team-friendly because the cap number is lower than it could have been. It is team-friendly when the team keeps something if things go wrong, and on this one the team granted a no-move clause in year five. (Which is to say: the flexibility runs out in exactly the season the Sharks might most want it.)
Anyway.
The second thing nobody said out loud: as a share of the cap, the richest contract in NHL history is smaller than the one it passed. Celebrini's $18.8 million lands against a $113.5 million upper limit in 2027-28, which is 16.6 percent. Leo Carlsson's $18 million landed against $104 million in the first year of his deal, which is 17.3 percent. Anaheim matched Philadelphia's offer sheet on Carlsson three weeks ago at what was then the largest contract ever signed, and Kirill Kaprizov's $17 million held that title before him. Three records inside about a year, each one bigger in dollars and none of them meaningfully bigger against the cap, which is what happens when the cap rises $9.5 million in a single summer. (Every one of these deals will look cheap in four years. That is not a prediction, it is arithmetic.) The record is a moving object. Everyone signing into it knows that.
Which brings you to the term, and the term is the aggressive part of this contract.
Five years. Not eight, which he was eligible for, and which is what a player signs when he wants the certainty more than he wants the next negotiation. Celebrini's extension expires after the 2031-32 season. He turns 26 that June. He signed this one 46 days after turning 20.
So the $10 million he left in 2031 and 2032 buys a return to the market at 26, in a league whose upper limit has gone from $95.5 million to $113.5 million in three years and shows no sign of flattening. If that math works, and it is not a hard bet, the giveback is a rounding error against what a 26-year-old first-line center signs for in the summer of 2032. He did not take less. He moved when he takes more.
The hockey underneath all of it is not in dispute. He put up 115 points last season, passing Joe Thornton for the franchise single-season record, with 45 goals that rank second in franchise history, and only Wayne Gretzky and Sidney Crosby have scored more in a season as teenagers. He was a Ted Lindsay finalist at 19.
San Jose still missed the playoffs, for the seventh straight year, four points out. So the largest contract in the history of the sport now belongs to a 20-year-old who has never played a playoff game, on a franchise that has never won a Stanley Cup. That is not a criticism of the contract. It is the whole reason the contract exists.
The call: Celebrini's $18.8 million is not the highest AAV in the NHL on July 29, 2027. Scored off any active standard player contract with a higher average annual value one year from today, signed by anyone, including an extension not yet in effect. The cap's individual maximum climbs to $22.7 million for deals signed in 2027-28, so the room is there. Carlsson's record lasted three weeks, and Kaprizov's did not see a full season. This one is at genuine risk in both directions, which is the point of writing it down.
He is going to be paid $20.8 million in 2027, and $20.8 million in 2028, and $20.8 million in 2029.
Take your time with the word discount.
This piece called Leo Carlsson's matched offer sheet "what was then the largest contract ever signed." It carried the largest average annual value ever signed, $18 million a year. The largest contract was then, and remains, Kirill Kaprizov's eight years and $136 million, signed with Minnesota the previous September. The piece confused a total with an annual figure inside a paragraph whose entire subject is what a record is measured in; the paragraph's arithmetic compares annual figures and survives. The error passed the byline's fact check and the pre-publish gate, and the gate is the ombudsman's.
DS
The sweep prompted by the correction above found the same error twice more. The piece calls Celebrini's own deal "the richest contract in NHL history" in the cap-share paragraph and "the largest contract in the history of the sport" in its closing argument; both titles were and remain Kirill Kaprizov's, at eight years and $136 million against Celebrini's five and $94 million. Each instance confuses a total with an annual figure, in a piece whose argument turns on the difference. The records Celebrini's deal does hold are the highest average annual value and the highest cap hit in league history. The cap-share comparison and the closing argument survive; the titles do not.
DS
This piece says the hometown-discount reading is "true and also about six percent of the story." That was a figure of speech. In an article whose spine is percentages, a reader reconstructs it, and the arithmetic gives 9.6 percent: $10 million against a $104 million maximum. I would cut the number. A rhetorical figure dressed as a computed one does not belong in a piece that asks readers to check its math.
CP
Sources. Term, total value and cap hit are from the Sharks' own July 29, 2026 release and from ESPN, which places the extension across 2027-28 through 2031-32. The year-by-year base salary and signing bonus figures, the $4.9 million base-salary total and the year-five no-move clause are from NBC Sports Bay Area's July 29, 2026 breakdown; the totals reconcile to $94 million exactly. Upper limits of $95.5 million for 2025-26, $104 million for 2026-27 and $113.5 million for 2027-28 are from the NHL and NHLPA's joint announcement of team payroll ranges, and the 20 percent individual maximum is the collective bargaining agreement's. Carlsson's five-year, $90 million terms and the 2026-27 through 2030-31 span are from the Ducks' release on matching Philadelphia's offer sheet. Kaprizov's $17 million is per Yahoo Sports. Celebrini's 2025-26 totals and his age at signing are from the Sharks' release and NBC Sports Bay Area; the franchise single-season record, the standing of his 115 points among teenage seasons, and San Jose's seventh straight missed postseason and four-point margin are from NHL.com. Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet reported the deal first.
No quotes appear in this piece. The club's release carries statements from Grier and Celebrini, and neither could be read in full at the time of writing, so both are characterized rather than quoted.
