The Blues got aggressive and broke a league taboo by signing two Oilers to offer sheets at a precarious moment. Will more teams follow suit?

This morning, the St. Louis Blues announced that they signed Philip Broberg and Dylan Holloway (both Edmonton Oiler restricted free agents) to offer sheets.  Sportnet's Elliotte Friedman reported the Broberg deal to be two years at a $4.58 million average annual value and Holloway's to be two years with a $2.29 million AAV.  If these were unrestricted free agent contracts signed July 1, they would hardly make a splash in St. Louis, but it being August and these being RFA offer sheets turns the move into national news.  With shrewd timing and a carefully chosen target, St. Louis put the Oilers into difficulty.

Why Are Offer Sheets Significant?

We have not seen an NHL RFA sign an offer sheet since the Canadiens declined to match the one-year, $6.1 million deal Jesperi Kotkaniemi signed with the Hurricanes in August 2021.  Carolina did little to shield the fact that the deal was revenge for the front-loaded five-year, $42.27 offer sheet to which Montreal signed Sebastian Aho, before the Canes matched it two summers earlier.

At this time last summer, I posited that the conditions surrounding RFA offer sheets looks an awful lot like those in the infancy of free agency in Major League Baseball, eventually resulting in a $280 million settlement from the owners to the MLBPA in 1990.  

Then, MLB owners had an under-the-table agreement not to sign one another's pending free agents, because opening up the labor marketplace in that way would raise salaries league wide.  Free agency was allowed, but owners made sure it didn't happen until the Players Association took legal action.

Today, a lack of RFA offer sheets in the the NHL lowers salaries in the years before a player is eligible for unrestricted (in plain English, "true" is probably better) free agency.  Without having any real competition in negotiation, teams have supreme leverage over even the best RFAs in the league.  In fact, there was more free agent player movement in 1980s baseball prior to the settlement than there are RFA offer sheets (let alone RFAs moving teams) in today's NHL.  That Carolina's Kotkaniemi maneuver was transparently retribution reinforced the idea of an unspoken rule: We just don't do that here.

Against that back drop, regardless of the players or teams involved, any offer sheet is a significant offer sheet.

What Makes the Blues' Maneuver Effective?

There are two reasons St. Louis' move caused difficulty: timing and target.  In mid-August, teams (or at least contending teams) aspire to be more or less done with the heavy lifting for the offseason, which means they are unlikely to have much flexibility on the margins of their roster because of their proximity to the salary cap.  In that context, if you are among the teams not at any risk of running up against the cap, you have the opportunity to take advantage by paying a bit more than you imagine the team holding a player's rights can afford, even if it's also a bit of an overpay.

Then you have the fact that, per PuckPedia, the Oilers are $354,167 over the salary cap without either Broberg or Holloway on the books.  Even to keep Holloway alone will require some financial maneuvering after the Oilers' summer UFA pick ups.  By targeting both at the same time, the Blues increased their odds at acquiring at least one of the two players.  

The move proves what many pundits and fans have been saying for a long time: there is an inefficiency to be exploited when it comes to RFA if teams are just willing to overcome the taboo.  It probably isn't a path to acquiring a superstar, but it can be a great way to acquire quality depth from cap-strapped teams that you believe could thrive in a larger role elsewhere.

What Next?

For the Blues?  I have no idea.  I find them to be among the more confusing teams in the league.  I don't see what the plan is, but between this and re-signing Pavel Buchnevich, it seems as though they aren't interested in a teardown for now.  If they do decide to pull that plug, there are a lot of interesting pieces there (Buchnevich still among them, albeit unlikelier now that he has lots of term attached).

From the Oilers perspective, I think in a lot of ways the pre-existing salary cap makes the decision for you.  You can't afford to keep Broberg at that number and a second is solid compensation; meanwhile, at $2.29 million, the 22-year-old Holloway probably remains too good a value to part with.

Regardless of what the Oilers decide with either, the real significance is whatever comes next in the RFA marketplace.  Will we see a Kotkaniemi-style revenge deal?  Will we see a new wave of RFA deals, if not now, then next summer?  Will the status quo of few and far between offer sheets hold?

Two of those three outcomes would not change the fact that the scarcity of offer sheets continues to suggest collusive behavior to restrict RFA salaries, with one incident hardly enough to buck what is as old as the league's salary cap itself.

How Does This Affect the Red Wings?

In the short term, these two offer sheets are unlikely to impact Detroit's two marquee RFAs, Moritz Seider and Lucas Raymond, as those are two core players the Red Wings have intentionally delegated a major chunk of cap toward, even if their contracts have not yet been signed.  St. Louis could target Broberg and Holloway because, even if they were effective players on Edmonton's Stanley Cup Final run, they are peripheral.  It's more than unlikely there is a contract any team could offer Raymond or Seider that Detroit wouldn't match.  Meanwhile, there is hardly a team in the league able to make such an offer at this point in the league calendar, and both players publicly declared their singled-mindedness on the Red Wings entering restricted free agency.

Jonatan Berggren, also an RFA, might be a different story, as a salary cap carefree team probably could offer Berggren more than Detroit would be willing or able to pay.  There, of course, the question is whether a team would be willing to do that for Berggren, which seems unlikely.  If a team had so coveted Berggren, they likely could've had him by now via trade.  Still, at least in theory, he would be a candidate should a team feel confident he could play a bigger role than the one on offer with the Red Wings.

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