The Detroit Lions finalized long-term contract extensions with two of their cornerstone players the week of the NFL draft last year, but team president Rod Wood wasn’t saying if he had another deal with Aidan Hutchinson up his sleeve ahead of the draft this week.

“No comment,” Wood said Monday during a pre-draft event hosted by the Detroit Economic Club. “He will be here the long haul, I can assure you of that.”

The Lions have spent the past 12 months locking up much of their young nucleus. They signed quarterback Jared Goff and 2021 draft picks Penei Sewell, Amon-Ra St. Brown and Alim McNeill to extensions last year, and re-signed fellow ’21 draft picks Derrick Barnes and Levi Onwuzurike in free agency this spring.

Sewell and St. Brown agreed to deals on the same day last April – the day before the draft kicked off in Detroit.

Lions general manager Brad Holmes said this spring his top priority was to re-sign 2022 draft picks Aidan Hutchinson and Kerby Joseph, and that pending deals with those two players (and extensions he hoped to get done in the future with the Lions’ star-studded 2023 class) impacted how the team approached free agency.

The Lions signed just one veteran free agent to a multi-year deal, adding cornerback D.J. Reed to replace departed starter Carlton Davis.

Wood said Monday the Lions tried to re-sign Davis before agreeing to terms with Reed and he reiterated the team’s commitment to keeping Hutchinson and Joseph in town. Hutchinson led the Lions with 7.5 sacks last season despite missing 12 games with a broken leg, while Joseph led the NFL with nine interceptions.

“We’ll start working on that,” Wood said of Hutchinson’s new deal. “And we have a track record of extending our own players, which we’ve done that recently with Sewell and St. Brown and McNeill, and I think that Hutch is likely to be coming up soon.

“We’ve got Kerby Joseph who’s also due for an extension and that’s going to be the challenge is we built this great foundation of players and we’ve benefited with many of them being on rookie contracts and now they’re all becoming second-contract players, which you have to plan for. And we’ve been doing that really for the last three years. So we’re ready to keep all these guys here for the long haul and keep this foundation in place and keep building, as I said, with more players picked this week.”

The Lions, coming off a 15-2 season that ended with an unexpected divisional round playoff loss to the Washington Commanders, have the 28th pick in the first round of this year’s draft, which begins Thursday in Green Bay.

Wood said Monday he expects Detroit be a strong contender to host the draft again in the near future, and he needled Green Bay in the process, joking that the city might have the third-biggest draft turnout ever after it finished third in the NFC North last season.

Detroit set an NFL draft record with an estimated 750,000 attendees last year.

“I’ve mentioned to (NFL commissioner) Roger (Goodell), ‘How could you ever do better than this?'” Wood said. “I think it’s probably going to be a few years from now (that it will come back). A lot of cities are biding on it. Green Bay has it this weekend. Pittsburgh has it next year.

“A lot of the cities that are unlikely to host a Super Bowl, this would be their Super Bowl opportunity. So it’ll be competitive, but I know that when they reconsider Detroit, whenever that is, it’s not going to be tough for the league to support bringing it back here.”

Wood also said Monday he expects the Lions to max out with six primetime games when the schedule is released next month.

“I think we’ll get the maximum number assigned to us and who knows, maybe get flexed into maybe another one later in the season,” Wood said. “If you like Sunday 1 o’clock games, you’re going to be very disappointed because there won’t be a lot of those. I think we’ll be playing 4:25 kickoffs on national TV, which we were the No. 1 team on every broadcast network last year.

“So TV likes us, the stars that we have, I think the way we play, our coach makes us an appealing team and I expect to see us a lot on prime time.”