Let’s talk about offer sheets (Trending Topics)
With the salary cap either barely rising, holding steady, or maybe even falling a bit, the buzzards are already circling.
Several teams — successful teams — are facing cap issues, and all of them have restricted free agents to re-sign. As such, fans of many cash-strapped teams and pundits alike are wringing their hands in glee over the possibility of weaker teams acquiring young, tantalizing talent for the price of the money on the deal and a few draft picks. It’s the same every summer, of course, because you always have a wish list on hand and it’s a sexy, swashbuckling idea.
“You just swoop in and get the guy you want.”
But we all say that every summer knowing that these offer sheets are rare. In the salary cap era, only eight have actually been signed (we don’t know if, say, P.K. Subban was advanced one but didn’t sign it, because that kind of thing doesn’t get publicized) and only three of those have come since 2010. The reason it seems we’re getting so worked up about it now is the quality of guys who look like they could be available.
By my count, at the very least you’re looking at Dougie Hamilton from Boston (already a borderline-elite defenseman), Brandon Saad (an integral part of Chicago’s Cup win), Derek Stepan (the Rangers’ best center), and both Tyler Toffoli and Martin Jones from the Kings (the latter a high-end goaltending prospect, the former a proven NHLer) being coveted here, because what team wouldn’t want those players? But there are so many issues when it comes to signing these guys that these are mostly just pipe dreams.
One issue is that offer sheets, even if they’re accepted, can be matched. Of the eight in the salary cap era, just one has actually been accepted. When Edmonton overpaid for Dustin Penner in 2007, Anaheim just said, “We’ll take the picks,” and the Ducks got their first, second, and third in the 2008 draft.
But what Anaheim did next was a bit complicated: First, it turned that first-rounder (No. 13) into the Nos. 17 and 28 picks and grabbed Jake Gardiner with the first of those. Then it flipped the No. 28 for Nos. 35 and 39 overall, which netted them Nicolas Deschamps and Eric O’Dell. Then they grabbed Justin Schultz with the No. 43 they got from the offer sheet. The third-rounder they traded for Marc-Andre Bergeron at the previous deadline. Of that group, only Bergeron ended up playing any games for the Ducks, and he got into a total of nine. So probably safe to say they regret the whole thing (then again, they also got Francois Beauchemin in the Gardiner/Joffrey Lupul trade, so maybe not?).
The point is, though, that it comes down to asset management. Teams have to weigh the value of the picks they would receive if an offer sheet is advanced versus the value provided to the original team by the player at that price point. Moreover, as discussed here, there’s the concern that letting a player walk comes back to bite the team because they let a future or even current superstar go and got jack squat back in return. That is to say, you get the picks back, sure, but what you do with them is another matter entirely. In general, draft success is heavily predicated upon luck and while a top-10 or top-15 pick is obviously going to give you a higher chance of not striking out, is the guy you get there ever going to be as valuable as, say, Hamilton or Saad? Probably not.
So that means GMs will almost always match, even if it means overpaying. Colorado didn’t like the idea of paying Ryan O’Reilly much at all back in 2013, so they let him stay in the KHL, but the second Calgary tried to give him $5 million per for two years, Colorado wanted in. The Flyers signed Shea Weber to an offer sheet they thought Nashville would never, ever match, and of course Nashville matched because it couldn’t let its star defenseman walk with the looming uncertainty of what Ryan Suter would do the next summer.
Now to be fair, Nashville and Colorado weren’t cap teams. In fact, looking at the historical data, it seems that the only actual mega-tight cap team targeted for an offer sheet was Chicago in 2010 (a few were within the ballpark of the ceiling but not over a barrel like many are today) when the Sharks tried to scoop up Niklas Hjalmarsson at the same time as they pried away Antti Niemi as a UFA. Teams would rather sign guys to a slightly or even very inflated price so as not to lose them, rather than lose them and assuage themselves with draft picks and further trades.
Look at what Boston did last summer, for instance. Rather than wait for Torey Krug and Reilly Smith to be signed elsewhere, they got them both locked down and had to trade Johnny Boychuk for picks. That’s how it goes, but GMs would rather figure it out after re-signing RFAs than go without them in favor of pricier, better-understood quantities like these long-time veterans. Thus, too, the Great Chicago Sell-off Mk. 1 in Summer 2010, and the Mk. 2 that likely comes this in the next few weeks.
That sell-off will likely be what’s needed to keep Saad at the very least, and a similar one should hit Boston regardless of whether Hamilton is actually advanced an offer sheet. But if he is, Don Sweeney would be foolish to do anything but sign him to it and worry about the other consequences later. The Rangers are another team with cap concerns, as they already have almost $62 million committed for next season and have to re-sign Stepan, Carl Hagelin, J.T. Miller, and Jesper Fast. The first two of these guys alone should eat up most of whatever cap room they have left, even if they trade Cam Talbot and find a cheap backup somewhere.
Los Angeles, though, is a bit of a different case, because they have two coveted RFAs and will have very little cap room to work with indeed. While they only have two UFAs worth keeping — Justin Williams and Andrej Sekera — they also have a little less than $61 million committed to the cap already, if you don’t include Slava Voynov’s $4.17 million (if you do, they’re north of $65 million already).
In a worst-case scenario (meaning the ceiling goes down if the NHLPA doesn’t use any part of the available escalator), $65 million is probably right around where the cap is. Meaning they basically have to let Sekera and Williams walk, full-stop, and try to get a deal done with Toffoli and Jones, plus replace those two UFAs and find someone to fill Jarret Stoll’s role for about $4 million. That makes for some tough decisions.
In a best-case (the unlikely event that the full 5 percent escalator is used), the cap probably moves up marginally to about $71 million. That mens they probably have about $10 million to sign Toffoli and Jones, plus replace Williams, Sekera, and Stoll. Still not where you want to be, but better.
Either way, it seems as though the situation in LA is dire, meaning that you might be able to make something work. That is to say they’re the likeliest candidate to be hit with an offer sheet, or maybe even two. TSN’s Travis Yost has long advocated for someone with multiple first-round picks in the next few years to try to sign both of them, because at that point you’re almost guaranteed to get one of them. Buffalo, he says, seems like the obvious choice because, a) Such a move could dramatically accelerate their rebuild and they don’t care about player cost at this time, and b) Tim Murray took pains to not give away picks for 2016 as the Dan Bylsma compensation, preserving his ability to extend an offer sheet this summer.
But for fans of the very concept of The Offer Sheet — and those of teams not affected by said deals — this probably means you can expect one, maybe two offer sheets to be signed this summer at the very most. And that they’d probably be matched. The whole situation makes for uncomfortable situations, but that’s how it goes, and GMs are content trying to un-paint their way out of a corner. The fact is that most players who were offer sheeted are very good ones — with the notable exception being Steve Bernier, and Vancouver even matched that — and they’d rather stick with what they know.
But what these situations for Chicago, Boston, LA, and the Rangers also tell us is another simple lesson in good roster management, of which all are guilty and now sweating the consequences: Don’t give term and big money to depth players.
Because if you do, you might just lose someone you should actually value to an offer sheet. Maybe. And even if you don’t, you might still be forced to make deals you don’t want to make, and end up hurting your team’s competitive capabilities.
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
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