inside the islanders The tricky decisions the Islanders face amid the rising tide of eye-opening NHL contracts By Ethan Sears Published Oct. 3, 2026, 6:20 a.m. ET Impending free agent Simon Holmstrom (92) takes a shot during a preseason game at UBS Arena on Sept. 26, 2026. Corey Sipkin for the NY POST One of the most important pieces of Islanders news this week didn’t happen to the Islanders at all, and we are not talking about Kirill Marchenko, who Mathieu Darche was not-so-secretly going after.
We are talking about Tristan Luneau, who signed a six-year contract extension at an average annual value of $7.2 million with Anaheim ahead of the Ducks’ season opener. That match on Friday night in Las Vegas, by the way, was the 15th NHL game of Luneau’s career.
Eye-watering contracts are nothing new, of course, and with the Ducks having been the victim of Leo Carlsson’s offer sheet over the summer, there’s a certain logic to Pat Verbeek deciding that he simply can’t mess around with a young, promising defenseman who won a job on the first pair out of training camp. Still, Luneau’s extension wasn’t a record cap hit for an up-market player that confirms something everyone already knew, a la Cale Makar’s contract and the prevailing assumption that Matthew Schaefer can name his price on an extension.
There’s been a theory that while NHL stars will see huge paydays as a result of the cap increase, the trickle-down effect on players lower on the depth chart will be minimal. Luneau’s extension spits in the face of that theory because, however good he might be in the future, the risk he’ll either flame out or become merely a solid top-four defenseman will have been priced into the contract negotiations.
