Cale Makar’s $20.4 million deal landed in a massive way on Friday. Quinn Hughes still does not have an extension. That gap is the Minnesota Wild’s problem first, and the New Jersey Devils’ opening if Minny cannot live with the number.
That’s the story, if you want the short version. However, if you want the longer one, it’s a conversation about what that number does to Minnesota, and why New Jersey is the team that benefits if the Wild blink.
The comparable is no longer theoretical
For two months the Hughes talks lived in a fog. Owner Craig Leipold said they would sign him and that term was the fight — Minnesota wanted as long as it could get, Hughes might want something closer to three years, five if both sides gave a little. Bill Guerin kept saying these things take time. Elliotte Friedman noted the conversations had gone quiet. Michael Russo said the Devils-trade stuff was invented. All of which are true. Yet, none of it answered the only question that matters in a negotiation: what is the player worth?
Makar answered it.
He is the better résumé — two Norris Trophies, a Conn Smythe, a Cup — and he is a year older. Hughes is the other name in that tier. One Norris. Same job description. Same age window. Same agent-level argument about who drives a team’s breakout. You can quibble over 80-point seasons and zone starts. You cannot tell Pat Brisson that the market for that player is $15 million anymore.
If Hughes signs an extension before next July, the cap maximum is still 20 percent of this year’s $104 million ceiling, or $20.8 million. If he waits and signs somewhere else on July 1, 2027, the max becomes 20 percent of a $113.5 million cap, which is about $22.7 million. Makar just put a floor under the first number and made the second one look like a raise, not a fantasy.
Eight years is almost gone. That matters more for Minnesota than for Makar.
September 15 is the last day a team can hand its own player an eight-year deal under the old rules. After that the new CBA cuts the max to seven years with the current club and six with a new one. Makar got through the door. Hughes has two and a half weeks.
If that window shuts, Minnesota’s last structural advantage shrinks to a single extra year versus free agency. That is still something. It is not what Colorado just bought.
Hughes may not want eight years anyway. The three-year idea has been out there all summer because it would expire with his brother, Jack Hughes, in New Jersey in 2030. A short deal at Makar money is a different problem than a long one. Long deals average down as the cap climbs. Short deals do not. Minnesota asking for term and Hughes asking for a number next to $20 million is how you get a stalemate that lasts into camp.
Camp opens in the middle of September. Preseason starts the 19th. The season starts September 29. Unsigned on opening night does not make Hughes a rental by rule. He can sign in October, December, March, whenever. What it does is turn every press conference into a referendum on the trade that brought him to St. Paul. Minnesota already gave up Zeev Buium, Marco Rossi, Liam Öhgren, and a first-round pick for a player who can walk next July. That deal only looks smart if he stays. The longer he sits unsigned, the more that sentence gets repeated.
The Kaprizov problem is real. It is not the one people think it is.
Kirill Kaprizov starts his $17 million year this fall. Stack a $20.4 million Hughes extension on top of that and you are at $37.4 million for two players. That looks insane until you look at when the Hughes money actually lands.
This season Hughes still counts $7.85 million. Minnesota is already tight — about $102.85 million against a $104 million cap, a million and change of space, a little over $5 million at the deadline. They cannot add a real center in September without moving salary. That is the year the two priorities run into each other. Not 2028. Now.
Next year the books open. Puckpedia shows the Wild have around $67.5 million committed to 11 players, with nearly $46 million of space on a $113.5 million cap. Put Hughes at $20.4 million and the core looks like this:
Kaprizov $17 million. Hughes’ potential $20.4 million. Brock Faber $8.5 million. Matt Boldy $7 million. Filip Gustavsson $6.8 million. Jonas Brodin $6 million. Joel Eriksson Ek $5.25 million. Another $1.67 million in Parise and Suter dead cap. Call it $73 million on those pieces.
That leaves roughly $40 million for everybody else. Legal. Playable, if the other 16 contracts are cheap.
Add the center Guerin has been chasing since May and the picture changes. A $10 million pivot puts you near $83 million before you have a third pairing, a 3C, or a backup. Still under the cap. The roster just gets skinny. Eriksson Ek and Brodin both hit the market after that season. Boldy’s next contract is coming. The cap is rising, which is the only reason this conversation is even possible. Rising cap does not add a 1C. It just keeps the spreadsheet from exploding.
Guerin has spent the summer looking for that center. Dylan Larkin. Robert Thomas. Names in that range. The playoffs made the hole obvious when Eriksson Ek went down and Ryan Hartman had to fake a first-line job. Minnesota has star wingers and a star defenseman. It does not have the middle. Guerin has said they are in a window and he does not want that window three-quarters open. Fine. Windows cost money in more than one place.
So the honest version is not “Minnesota cannot afford Hughes.” It is this: they can afford Hughes or they can afford Hughes and a true 1C and a deep roster. Probably not all three at Makar’s rate, on the term Hughes might actually sign.
Cash is the other piece people skip. Kaprizov’s contract is loaded with July 1 bonuses. Makar’s is too. The new CBA caps signing bonuses at 60 percent of the total. If Hughes wants to be paid like those two, Leipold is writing bigger checks up front under worse rules. That is an ownership question. Cap space is the GM’s problem. Bonus checks are the owner’s.
What that does for New Jersey
It does not definitively put Hughes in a Devils sweater this month. It does mean they are not stuck waiting until July if Minnesota ever puts him on the market.
New Jersey is carrying about $3.85 million of space on a $104 million cap. Hughes still counts $7.85 million this season. On paper that looks like a hard stop. It is not, if the other side of the trade is Dawson Mercer.
Mercer is at $4 million. Move him out and the Devils free up exactly what they need to take Hughes’s current hit. $3.85 million of space plus Mercer’s $4 million is $7.85 million. That is Hughes this year, dollar for dollar, before anyone talks about retention or a third team. The numbers will drift between now and November — bonuses, extras, a healthy extra forward — but the structure is already there. They do not need to dump Dougie Hamilton or gut the middle six to make a 2026-27 trade legal. They need Minnesota to want a package that includes Mercer.
That package is the point. Mercer alone is not payment for Quinn. Minnesota gave up Buium, Rossi, Öhgren, and a first to get him. If they sell, they will want a first, a prospect, and a roster player who helps them this winter. Mercer is the roster player. He can play center or wing, he is 24, and he still has an RFA year behind this one. He is not the 1C Guerin has been chasing. He is a cheap, useful forward on a team that would be losing its best defenseman and suddenly has a hole in the lineup. For a Wild club sitting about $1.15 million under the cap, swapping $7.85 million of Hughes for $4 million of Mercer also creates room. They could use that room. They have been trying to buy a center all summer with almost none of it.
So the September objection is weaker than it looks. The cap objection at the deadline is weaker still. The Devils projected deadline room is already close to $17.8 million. Mercer in the deal is how it works in October or December instead of March.
None of that forces Minnesota to make the call. The only claim here is mechanical: if the Wild decide an unsigned Hughes is a sunk cost, New Jersey can fit him this season without waiting for next year’s $32 million of space. Mercer is the piece that makes the books match.
The clean window is still July 2027. That summer the Devils are looking at roughly $32 million-plus of room on a $113.5 million cap, with 14 players signed. Hischier’s new hit ($11.7 million) starts then. Jack is $8 million through 2029-30. Luke is $9 million through 2031-32. Hamilton comes off after 2027-28. They do not need to buy a 1C to justify the winter. They already have two centers. Their problem is one expensive defenseman, not two mega-forwards plus a hole down the middle.
Family is the part that does not show up on the cap. Jack has said he wants to play with Quinn. Luke has said the same. That does not obligate Quinn to pick Newark. It does mean the Devils are the only team that can put that sentence in an offer letter. Luke and Quinn are both left-shot puck-movers, so the hockey fit is not automatic. You figure that out after you have him.
Yet, the math that places two brothers in one location already is real.
The actual argument
Makar did not transfer Hughes to the Devils. He made Minnesota’s decision expensive.
The Wild have a $17 million winger, a missing center, almost no cap space this season, and two weeks left to offer the contract structure Makar just signed. Hughes has a comparable, a family landing spot, and a free-agency max that goes up if he waits. Those facts can still produce a Minnesota extension. They can also produce a winter where the talks stay quiet, camp opens, and Guerin has to decide whether an unsigned Norris winner is a core piece or the remainder of a trade he cannot afford to lose for nothing.
The Devils lives in that second sentence. Not the first.
James is a fully credentialed New Jersey Devils beat reporter for New Jersey Hockey Now on Sportsnaut and the … More about James Nichols