Gongshow Previews UD Premier Week as Hockey Gets Its First $20 Million Man — Video of the Day
The hockey card season turned over this morning, and it did so three days after the sport handed out the largest contract in its history. The Hockey Cards Gongshow Podcast posted "2026-27 Hockey Hobby Breakout Candidates, 2025-26 UD Premier Release Week Preview & Makar Gets Paid!" at 8:00 a.m. UTC on August 31, 2026.
The title stakes out three things: breakout candidates for the 2026-27 season, a release-week preview of 2025-26 Upper Deck Premier, and a reaction to Cale Makar's new contract. What the show concludes on any of the three is the show's to deliver — the video is embedded above and worth your time for the argument itself.
The Contract the Hobby Woke Up To
Makar signed an eight-year, $163.2 million extension with the Colorado Avalanche on Friday, August 28. According to the NHL, the deal begins next season, carries an average annual value of $20.4 million, and is the richest contract in league history. It also makes the 27-year-old two-time Norris Trophy winner the first player in the NHL ever to sign at an AAV of $20 million or more.
Joe Sakic, the Avalanche president of hockey operations and general manager, called Makar a generational defenseman in the club's announcement and said the team was thrilled to have him in an Avalanche sweater for the next decade.
Reporting from Heavy, published August 30 via Yahoo Sports, put the number in a longer frame: when the extension kicks in ahead of the 2027-28 season, Makar becomes the first player in NHL history to surpass $20 million in yearly earnings, and by the time the deal expires after 2034-35 it will have paid him nearly as much as Sidney Crosby has earned from NHL contracts since 2005-06 — $165.67 million — and more than Evgeni Malkin's $151.7 million since 2006-07.
The Record He Broke Belongs to a Name This Blog Knows
The detail that ties the contract to the card market is whose record fell. Per the NHL, Makar's $20.4 million AAV surpassed the five-year, $94 million deal — an $18.8 million AAV — that Macklin Celebrini signed with the San Jose Sharks on July 29.
Celebrini is the player whose card the blog logged in CASE #0262: a one-of-one that sold for $1,281,000, the highest-selling non-Gretzky hockey card ever recorded. His contract record lasted thirty days.
Analysis: Two hockey players reset the league's pay ceiling inside five weeks, and the card market had already priced one of them at seven figures before either deal was signed. That is a market being asked to value hockey talent at a moment when the sport's own economics are moving quickly, and the video arrives at the front edge of it. What the contract does not tell you is anything about card prices — a salary record is a fact about a payroll, not a comp. CASE #0156 made the related point about the post-Olympics surge in U.S. hockey cards: the demand held, but it held for its own reasons.
Where the Video Sits
The channel's public feed shows a dedicated hockey-card operation rather than a general hobby channel that occasionally covers the sport. The last fifteen uploads run near-daily and carry recurring formats: Slab Sharks Weekly, Friday Nights w/ Phil, Gongshow Breaks, California Dave Rips & Reviews, and a Top 5 Hockey Card Sales Last Week rundown. Recent titles include a two-part sit-down with a collector about a $1.3 million hockey card purchase, and episodes on whether Outburst parallels now lead the market and whether Celebrini can meet the hobby's expectations.
Analysis: That is the editorial register of a specialist show speaking to an audience that already collects the sport, which is worth knowing before you weigh a breakout-candidate list. Specialist channels tend to be earlier and more specific than general hobby coverage, and they also tend to talk to the converted — a name floated as a breakout candidate on a hockey-cards podcast is a name being sold to people already shopping. Neither of those is a knock on the argument. Watch it and judge the picks.
The Timing Is the Point
A release week the show's title places at 2025-26 Upper Deck Premier, a fresh season's worth of prospects, and the largest contract in the sport's history all landing in the same seven days makes for an unusually crowded start to a hockey hobby calendar. The blog's own hockey coverage has been weighted toward vintage — Bobby Orr, Guy Lafleur, Patrick Roy, Maurice Richard, Steve Yzerman — and toward the record sales at the top of the modern market. A release-week preview aimed at the season ahead is the other half of that picture.
The verdict: worth your time if you collect hockey, and worth a look even if you don't. The Makar deal is the kind of number that pulls attention toward a sport the card market has spent a year re-rating, and this is the first hockey show out of the gate with it. Judge the breakout names on the show's own case for them, not on the size of the contract in the headline.
Channel: Hockey Cards Gongshow Podcast
