Blackhawks Defenseman Wyatt Kaiser Entering Important Contract Year ...Middle East

It’s been a wild summer of spending around the NHL, and the Blackhawks have been among the league’s biggest spenders. General manager Kyle Davidson put pen to paper on the two largest contracts by annual average value in the history of the franchise this summer, first with Bowen Byram and then with Connor Bedard.

But the money getting thrown around in the league has been enormous. As of this writing, the Blackhawks are the only team in the league to sign multiple players to contracts north of $9M per this offseason. However, since the start of the summer we’ve seen 12 new contracts written with an AAV of at least $9M. That number doesn’t include new contracts for Blue Jackets center Adam Fantilli or Ducks forward Cutter Gauthier, who are both still waiting for a new deal. If/When the Ducks sign Gauthier, they’ll join the Blackhawks in having two players making more than $10M per season; they matched Leo Carlsson’s $18M AAV offer sheet from the Flyers.

While Byram and Cale Makar are the only new $10M AAV defensemen this summer, that doesn’t mean money wasn’t spent on the blue line. And, as we’ve talked about previously, the Blackhawks have a long list of players to get signed next summer. Perhaps no player on the Blackhawks’ roster has likely benefitted more form this summer’s skyrocketing salaries than Wyatt Kaiser, who will be a restricted free agent with arbitration rights next summer.

Wyatt Kaiser’s Blackhawks Contract Market

Kaiser is entering the second year of a two-year contract that carries a modest $1.7M AAV. He appeared in a career-high 77 games last year and saw his ice time climb to 19:37 per night. I will note that his ice time climbed to an average of 20:53 per game in 20 appearances after March 1 last year. It was his first full season in the NHL, and Kaiser established himself as an NHL regular.

Which makes this coming season an important one for both Kaiser and the organization.

He’s still fairly young; Kaiser is still three NHL seasons away from unrestricted free agency. That’s something to keep in mind when we start talking about his next contract. The trend for many young defensemen — and forwards for that matter — this summer has been to sign a contract that either takes them up to their UFA summer or one year into UFA. Kaiser’s UFA summer would be 2030.

Which is also a noteworthy timeline because of the reports of planned NHL expansion to Texas in 2029. I previously wrote about how an expansion draft could impact the Blackhawks’ roster construction in the coming years. They will need to start planning for which players might be exposed to an expansion draft in three years when the next wave of contracts start coming.

Let’s look at some comparable players and contracts that were signed this past summer when thinking about Kaiser’s next deal with the Blackhawks.

I’m going to throw out all of the contracts given to players on the other side of their age-30 season because that’s a clear component of the comparison set. Kaiser will play his entire 2026-27 season as a 24 year old. These are the six new contracts written this past summer that will likely be considered when Kaiser and his agent, Ritchie Winter, chat with the Blackhawks’ front office about his third NHL contract:

I will note that Mintyukov and Nemec are younger (22), so the long-term play makes sense there. It’s also noteworthy that Nemec, Shea and Ferraro signed their contracts with new teams this summer (Nemec was traded). Drysdale was previously traded from Anaheim to Philadelphia in the deal that landed Cutter Gauthier for the Ducks.

Getting back to the Blackhawks’ roster construction and being mindful of a potential/likely expansion draft, we need to keep in mind that the Hawks will also need to negotiate a new contract with Artyom Levshunov and Sam Rinzel in the coming year. This likely shapes up as a more important season for both of them; they’re both former first-round picks with high expectations. The arrival of Byram should help shelter their usage a bit this year, but they are both skating for a significant raise on their second NHL contracts.

We also need to keep two other defensemen in mind when considering the term for Kaiser. The Blackhawks have more left-handed defensemen on the roster and in the system than their three available lineup spots, which gives us some pause. Xavier Villeneuve, the Hawks’ top pick in the 2026 NHL Draft, is headed to Boston University this season but could be in the mix for an NHL spot in the next 2-3 years. And Kevin Korchinski, another former first-round pick, just signed a modest two-year deal for his second NHL contract.

Looking forward, another strong season as a second-pair defenseman skating around 20 minutes per game could see Kaiser’s value in the $5M range on a contract with enough term to take him to unrestricted free agency in 2030 — which would also have him under contract for an expansion draft in three years.

The good news is the Blackhawks’ payroll isn’t in a bad place and a number in that range isn’t going to hurt the overall program. The long list of young skaters who will need new contracts will likely see some young guys taking mutually beneficial bridge deals that, again, put the Blackhawks in position to continue matriculating some of their top prospects to the NHL level and also gives the Hawks a good idea of their roster whenever that expansion draft becomes a reality.

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