Red Light newsletter 🏒 | This is The Athletic’s hockey newsletter. Sign up here to receive Red Light directly in your inbox.Good morning! Max Bultman here, filling in and writing to you from Windsor, Ont., where I can confirm that hockey — World Junior Summer Showcase hockey, to be exact — is being played. Consider that your first sign of the upcoming season cresting over the horizon.Let’s get into it.Macklin Celebrini is raising the bar for the NHL’s young stars. (Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)PaydayCelebrini gets paidFor the second time this summer, we’ve got a new record average annual value (AAV) in the NHL. Fittingly, that title will now belong to the player with the best chance to become the next face of the sport: the San Jose Sharks’ Macklin Celebrini.Yesterday, Celebrini signed a five-year extension with an $18.8 million AAV that begins in 2027-28 and keeps him in San Jose through 2032. Once it kicks in, it will surpass the previous high-water mark of $18 million, set earlier this summer by the Anaheim Ducks’ Leo Carlsson (via Flyers offer sheet).And this time, there was no offer sheet necessary: San Jose took care of business with Celebrini a year before his entry-level contract was set to expire and eliminated the possibility of any offer-sheet shenanigans in 2027.Celebrini made perfect sense as the next bar-setting player — though we’ll see what happens when Quinn Hughes and Cale Makar sign their next deals. And just as with Carlsson’s deal, it begins to define a contention window for one of the sport’s most promising young teams.Anaheim’s window was already open — the Ducks went to the second round of the playoffs last season — but the Celebrini-led Sharks are now officially on the clock to get into that mix. Their deep prospect pool features a ton of rising young talent that could contribute as soon as this season, but whether it’s immediately or in the five additional years he just signed for, the time to compete is approaching in San Jose.Leo Carlsson. (C. Morgan Engel / Getty Images)New trend for second contracts?While the dollar amount on Celebrini’s new deal is indeed massive, the five-year term might be the more interesting aspect of Wednesday’s news.Anaheim had no choice but to match the Flyers’ five-year offer to Carlsson earlier this summer. But for San Jose, going even longer would have been ideal. Instead, the five-year term means Celebrini will be eligible to become an unrestricted free agent in 2032, when he’s just 26 years old.And he and Carlsson are far from the only young players to take that path coming out of their ELCs. Connor Bedard also signed a five-year extension at a $15 million AAV earlier this month, and young defensemen Brandt Clarke, Pavel Mintyukov and Šimon Nemec all also went for the mid-term length, forgoing the more conventional options of a long-term pact or a two- or three-year bridge contract.