If you’ve followed the Calgary Flames this season – and if you’re a regular FlamesNation reader, we would wager that you have – one of the biggest stories for the hockey club during the 2024-25 season has been the emergence of promising young goaltending prospect Dustin Wolf into a legitimate National Hockey League goaltender.

Wolf’s performance has been impressive enough this season that two connected trains of thought have emerged:

Now, before we state anything else, let’s reiterate the obvious: Wolf was the fourth-from-last pick in the 2019 NHL Draft, and he’s made the teams that overlooked him in that draft year look extremely silly since then. He was the Western Hockey League’s goaltender of the year in 2019-20 and 2020-21 and the American Hockey League’s goaltender of the year in 2021-22 and 2022-23. So far this season, Wolf has been a difference-maker for the Flames and deserves his flowers; he’ll be appearing high on a lot of Calder Trophy ballots at the end of the year, and potentially might sneak onto a Vezina Trophy ballot or two (depending on if any general managers feel daring).

Wolf is in the first year of a two-year deal he signed over the summer, and he’s eligible to sign his next deal as of July 1. As it stands, he’ll become a restricted free agent following the 2025-26 season.

Is Wolf a good goalie? Heck yes. Does he look like he could be the club’s long-term starter? Heck yes. Does he deserve a raise over his current $850,000 cap hit? Heck yes. So, what should Wolf’s next deal look like?

Well, that’s a lot less clear-cut.

So here’s how contract negotiations typically work for players who aren’t yet unrestricted free agents: you treat them like arbitration hearings. The Flames will go into the discussions with a handful of players (and contracts) they feel are close to Wolf’s situation, and so will Wolf’s camp, and they’ll noodle away on it until they find enough common ground to hammer out a deal.

But here’s the issue: there aren’t a lot of goalies like Wolf.

Let’s explain. Usually when looking for comparable players, you look at players of similar ages, the same draft class, or similar levels of NHL experience or performance.

In the 2019 draft class, the closest goalie to Wolf’s 51 NHL games of experience is Spencer Knight, who’s played 79 games for Florida. Knight is in the first year of a three year deal with a $4.5 million cap hit that he signed in September (when he had 57 NHL games under his belt). Other recent goalie contracts that are sort of similar to Wolf and Knight are Jake Oettinger’s second contract signed in 2022 (three years, $4 million AAV) and Ukka-Pekka Luukkonen’s current deal (five years at $4.75 million AAV). Oettinger had played 77 games when he signed that deal, Luukkonen had played 100.

Considering that there are 27 games left this season and Wolf will probably play a good chunk of them, he’ll probably have somewhere between 60 and 70 NHL games to his credit when the off-season begins, so we’ll sort of within the ballpark of Knight, Oettinger and Luukkonen. But the fit with each of them isn’t perfect, and there aren’t a ton of other goalies who’ve signed new deals recently that are all that similar to Wolf. He’s a bit of a unicorn.

It’s also worth noting that when his current deal ends at the end of the 2025-26 season, Wolf will have two seasons remaining until he hits his unrestricted free agency seasons. That means that any deal that goes beyond two years would start buying up UFA years for Wolf, which would nudge his cap hit up.

So what does this all mean?

Wolf has only played 51 NHL games, so even with his superb performance this season, there’s reason to be cautious with throwing a long-term deal at a player suiting up at the sport’s most volatile position. That said, Wolf has been a huge difference-maker for the Flames this season, and so the temptation to try to lock him up long-term (and potentially get him for awhile at a good cap hit) makes sense, too. And the challenge for the Flames – and Wolf’s representatives at CAA Sports – is how to thread that needle and manage the risk for both team and player going forward.

Wolf has been good for the Flames, and the Flames have been good for Wolf. If we were the Flames, we would be really interested in exploring a lengthy deal for Wolf based on his performances thus far. But there really aren’t a ton of goalies like Wolf out there, and that makes it a bit of a challenge to determine what a market value deal for him looks like.

If it were up to us, the conversation would probably begin with Knight and Luukkonen’s current deals. But we suspect the more games Wolf steals for the Flames, the more likely it is that the cap hit on his next deal creeps above the $5 million mark.