Even at a much higher number than Pat Verbeek wanted, than what Leo Carlsson’s representation pushed for, than what the blossoming center himself even dreamed of, the Anaheim Ducks did what they could have ill-afforded not to do. Signed, sealed, delivered.The outrageous offer sheet that Carlsson signed with the Philadelphia Flyers last week was matched by the Ducks on Thursday. Five years and $90 million, with nearly an astonishing 95 percent of the contract paid out in structured signing bonuses.The 21-year-old silky Swede will continue being the Ducks’ No. 1 center, the player the organization envisioned building around when it surprised many draft observers by taking him instead of Adam Fantilli with the second pick in 2023 after Connor Bedard came off the board.Now that the question of whether to match the offer that rocked the hockey world has been put to bed, the Ducks have another to ponder and execute: Can they assemble a Stanley Cup-contending team with an $18 million per year player, the highest annual average in the NHL?The Ducks will put that to the test. Conceivably, that would have been the same for the Flyers. Still, it isn’t easy to attract stars to Anaheim, and the Ducks have one on the rise. Now they’re counting on Carlsson to be just that — a true franchise-leading star, if not one of the league’s best players.“It was surprising, to say the least,” Verbeek said of his and ownership’s reactions to the offer sheet. “I actually feel flattered, in a sense, that Philadelphia wanted such a great player. It means that we’re doing a very good job on our end, and we feel that Leo at some point — I would say next year, but I think over the course of this contract — is going to show the elite player that he is and is going to give us great reasons why we matched this offer.”On having the backing of billionaire Ducks owner Henry Samueli, Verbeek noted, “This has kind of been something that has been more forced on us than how we like to do contracts, but knowing our owner, he wants to win just like I do. And so, we’re going to do what needs to be done to win.”Can that be done? Is it even possible now that Carlsson’s $18 million AAV eats up 17.30 percent of the $104 million cap for the 2026-27 season? Can any NHL team win the Stanley Cup with one player taking up that much cap space?There haven’t been many eight-figure AAV players. Only a few (Jack Eichel, Sergei Bobrovsky, Aleksander Barkov) have won a Cup in the salary cap era with a $10 million cap number. The cap, which was a paltry $39 million following the 2004-05 lockout, has spiked in the last two seasons after flattening at $81.5 million and rising only modestly over five years.In this new landscape, the possibility of a player making $10 million or more annually hoisting the Cup should increase. Still, it hasn’t been easy for teams to win it all with a lot of cap space tied up in one player.Nathan MacKinnon was a champion in 2022, but that was before he negotiated his $13.5 million AAV extension with Colorado, as Mikko Rantanen ($9.25 million) and Cale Makar ($9 million) were the cap charge leaders for the Avalanche. Alex Ovechkin won in 2018, but his monstrous 14-year contract with the Washington Capitals averages out to $9.538 million. Nikita Kucherov and Andrei Vasilevskiy captured back-to-back Cups with the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2020 and 2021, but both carried cap hits of $9.5 million.