SEATTLE – As Mike Matheson continues to stack up strong games and show his importance to the Montreal Canadiens and their young defence corps, the talk about his contract status has picked up considerably.
Matheson is set to become an unrestricted free agent on July 1, and while there is speculation coming from all sides about what his next contract might look like, he has zero interest in talking about it.
“There’s no point,” Matheson said after practice Monday. “We’re not talking, there’s no news. I’d rather just focus on the games we have coming up … It’s just a distraction.”
Well, there was some news hidden in there, and that’s the fact the two sides are not talking. But Matheson trying to avoid distractions might have something to do with that as well. He is playing some of the best hockey of his life, one year after playing some of the previously best hockey of his life, which came one year after he set a career high in points with 62 in his second season with the Canadiens.
Cette passe de Boldy mérite un moment de silence
Can we just take a second to appreciate Boldy’s backhand sauce?#GoHabsGo pic.twitter.com/1MC6DkSSRY
— Canadiens Montréal (@CanadiensMTL) October 26, 2025
And while the two sides are not talking, Canadiens president of hockey operations Jeff Gorton made it clear earlier this month that Matheson remains a priority for his management team.
“We’ve been pretty clear, Mike has been a really good player for us since we got him — he’s been a big part of our turnaround in a lot of ways. He’s an example of what we want,” Gorton said Oct. 15, the day after he and general manager Kent Hughes signed five-year contract extensions. “He’s done everything we’ve asked. We’ve asked him to be the first power play, he did that well. We asked him to be a shutdown guy, he does that well. He kills penalties. Everything we’ve ever asked this guy, he’s done.
“We really appreciate Mike Matheson. Where he fits in? We’ll see. But we can certainly understand he’s had a great start to the season and we’re excited to see what he adds to our defence.”
Matheson has been grossly underpaid at $4.875 million a year, ever since being traded to Montreal in 2022 and probably even for a year before that.
But Matheson does not see his contract in that way.
“My opinion is always that I would much rather be outperforming a contract than underperforming a contract,” Matheson said. “That’s kind of the way I look at it.”
It is understandable that Matheson does not want to talk about his next contract, but the one he is currently completing is a highly relevant one to the Canadiens. On Oct. 7, 2017, Matheson signed an eight-year, $39 million contract with the Florida Panthers at the very beginning of his second full season in the NHL, a contract negotiated by Hughes back when he served as Matheson’s agent.
Matheson was just one of several young players the Panthers signed to long-term contracts coming out of their entry-level deals, thinking they were locking up their young core at salary numbers that would age well and give them a competitive advantage. One year before Matheson, the Panthers signed Aaron Ekblad for eight years and Aleksander Barkov and Jonathan Huberdeau for six years. Vincent Trocheck and Nick Bjugstad also signed six-year deals right out of entry-level deals around that time.
It looked like a sound strategy.
It also looks incredibly similar to what the Canadiens are doing now, with Cole Caufield, Juraj Slafkovský, Lane Hutson and Kaiden Guhle all signed to long deals out of entry-level contracts by the Gorton/Hughes administration, which inherited the Nick Suzuki contract from Marc Bergevin.
Those contracts should age well, but it is no guarantee, and Matheson is a prime example of that. Matheson, Huberdeau, Trocheck and Bjugstad were all traded by the Panthers before those contracts finished.
For Matheson, his time in Florida did not go well, and being traded to the Pittsburgh Penguins served as a much-needed reset.
With the benefit of time, he can look back on his days with the Panthers and admit having the big contract early on was a bit of a burden.
“You just want to live up to the expectations. You don’t want to be the guy where they’re like, ‘Oh my God, they’re stuck with him for how many years now?’ That kind of thing,” Matheson said. “I definitely felt that.”
Matheson’s ability to calculate risk was affected because of that desire to live up to the expectations his contract placed on him. He said it was “100 percent” a factor in his struggles early on in Florida.
“I think a lot of people don’t realize how grueling mentally a lot of things are, just the stress and anxiety of each game, and then the stress and anxiety of that kind of stuff, of feeling like you’re not where you want to be,” Matheson said. “There’s so many different things that can bug you if you let them. So I think it’s important to not (let them). And not to say that’s an easy thing to do, but find ways to block out the — a lot of people just use that buzzword, block out the noise.
“And I think a lot of people think of, ‘Oh the media, that’s what he’s talking about.’ No, it’s way beyond that. It’s the noise inside your head. There’s a lot more to it.”
Pressure to live up to his contract, from both others and himself, haunted Mike Matheson at times with the Florida Panthers. (Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)
This is extremely relevant to what the Canadiens are currently going through. Slafkovský and Guhle are in the first year of their new contracts, being paid millions of dollars a year to perform. That will be Hutson next year and, in all likelihood, Ivan Demidov the year after. It is a factor they will have to manage whenever they hit a slump, whenever they go through a stretch where things are not going the way they envisioned, whenever the noise in their heads tells them they are not meeting the expectations of those contracts.
Luckily for the Canadiens, they have someone in house with experience in that area. Matheson says he hasn’t specifically addressed it with any of his teammates, at least not in terms of their contracts and the pressure that comes with them. But if needed, he’s there.
How long Matheson will be there remains a question without an answer, but he’s not worried about that. That’s just additional noise, and part of what’s allowed Matheson to become the player he is today, the player the Canadiens feel is “an example of what we want,” the player the fan base is clamouring to see re-signed to a new contract, is his ability to shut out additional noise.
In other words, it would be counterproductive to think about his contract while he’s playing the best hockey of his life.
“I think I’ve definitely been playing solid. I’ve liked the way my decisions have gone and stuff like that,” Matheson said when asked how he feels he’s managed risk this season, something he has long identified as the reason why things didn’t work out for him in Florida.
“I think in some ways there’s been a reputation that’s followed me longer than I think my game has actually been (like that). And so, I think that’s more noise, right? And you just kind of try to keep it out.”
When Matheson signed his last contract with the Panthers, the big selling point Hughes the agent made to his client was a simple one.
“Security,” Matheson said. “If you get offered that much, that many years, you take it.”
It seems evident this won’t happen during the season, and there is a lot of season left to play, but it also seems clear that at some point, Hughes would be smart to offer Matheson security again, just from a different chair. That’s not only because of what Matheson is doing on the ice, but also because the young core players on the Canadiens could be facing a lot of the same noise in the coming years.
Having someone around who has already learned how to keep out that noise would have tremendous value.