Time will tell whether Ryan Leonard’s eight-year, $84 million contract extension proves to be a bargain or a gamble for the Washington Capitals.
Chris Patrick, though, is already skipping ahead and thinking about Leonard’s next deal, nearly a decade out.
Speaking to Mike Vogel, the Capitals general manager explained how the eight-year pact came about and how, in a perfect world, the 21-year-old forward ends his career in Washington.
“[A]s we get into two or three years out from here, he should be just entering his prime of his career when a lot of those guys are still on really good deals for our team,” Patrick explained. “So I think it just helps our competitive window to extend beyond just the next two or three years, but further down the road. We’re going to be getting prime Ryan Leonard towards the tail end of this contract, and then maybe doing another seven years once this one stops.”
That figurative next longterm deal would keep Leonard in Washington through the 2041-42 season — his 18th in the NHL — and until age 37. This talk comes as Leonard has scored 21 goals and posted 46 points in 84 career games.
While there’s much still to play out in Leonard’s career, the eighth overall pick from the 2023 NHL Draft is already one of the best scorers among his peers. Last season, he was one of just 12 players age 21 or younger to score at least 20 goals.
Players 21-or-younger who scored 20-or-more goals during the 2025-26 season
| Player | Age | Goals |
|---|---|---|
| Macklin Celebrini | 19 | 45 |
| Connor Bedard | 20 | 30 |
| Juraj Slafkovsky | 21 | 30 |
| Leo Carlsson | 21 | 29 |
| Adam Fantilli | 21 | 24 |
| Logan Cooley | 21 | 24 |
| Will Smith | 20 | 24 |
| Matthew Schaefer | 18 | 23 |
| Beckett Sennecke | 20 | 23 |
| Jimmy Snuggerud | 21 | 21 |
| Matvei Michkov | 21 | 20 |
| Ryan Leonard | 21 | 20 |
“From an NHL perspective, the analytics and the scout in me would like to see more NHL games obviously, before doing something like this,” Patrick said. “But I think it speaks to how comfortable we are with the character of the kid and the person, and also, there’s a larger body of work there that we’re comfortable with.”
In the article, Vogel reveals that the Capitals began discussing an extension with Leonard’s camp over the summer, initially presenting both a shorter-term deal and an eight-year option. As negotiations progressed, Leonard’s side became increasingly receptive to the maximum term. The two sides then spent the final few weeks focused on making an eight-year deal work.
The two camps wanted to get ahead of Leonard’s restricted free agency and the possibility of an offer sheet next summer — “I don’t think we wanted this hanging over our heads for the whole season,” says Patrick. They also wanted to take advantage of the final day where NHL teams were permitted to sign their own players for eight years under the outgoing CBA.
“For us, the biggest thing we wanted was term; we wanted a long window with Ryan. We want as many kicks at the can as we can have with him to try to win the Stanley Cup,” Patrick said. “If you put that into someone else’s hands and they put a four-year term on something or a five-year term on something, now you’re beholden to that. We just didn’t want to get to that point where we were basically beholden to someone else’s terms on a deal and didn’t have the kind of deal structure that we wanted, so we were glad to get ahead of it.”
And they’re already well ahead thinking about the team’s success in 2035-36.
