The St. Louis Blues offer sheeted Edmonton Oilers RFAs Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg, raising the question of whether the Seattle Kraken should worry about a team offer sheeting their star forward Matty Beniers.
The St. Louis Blues offer sheeted Edmonton Oilers RFAs Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg, raising the question of whether the Seattle Kraken should worry about a team offer sheeting their star forward Matty Beniers.
The Blues offered Holloway a two-year deal carrying a $2,290,457 AAV and Broberg a two-year deal carrying a $4,550,917 AAV. If the Oilers don't match the contracts they'll receive a second-round pick for Broberg and a third-round pick for Holloway. The Oilers have seven days to decide if they want to match the Blues offer.
Offer sheets are rare but still occur in today's game. The two most recent occurrences were the Carolina Hurricanes' offer sheeting Jesperi Kotkaniemi and the Montreal Canadiens' offer sheeting Sebastian Aho. The Hurricanes matched the offer for Aho but the Canadiens let Kotkaniemi go.
Going into the summer, the Kraken had two RFAs, Eeli Tolvanen and Beniers. The Kraken locked up Tolvanen on the last day of their 2024 development camp but Beniers has still not been signed. With each passing day, fans grow increasingly worried but GM Ron Francis has stated multiple times that they are confident in getting a deal done.
If the Kraken go into the 2024-25 season carrying an extra forward and defenseman, they'll have $6.3M in cap space according to Puckpedia. Ben Meyers, despite signing a one-way contract, could be sent down to the Coachella Valley Firebirds giving the Kraken $7M in cap space.
Finding the correct dollar amount for the term each party wants is likely what is making the deal take so long to complete.
The Kraken should feel comfortable and confident that Beniers won't sign or be tendered an offer sheet. If a team offers the 21-year-old a contract worth $6.87M to $9.16M, they'll have to give the Kraken first, second and third-round picks. At this point of the summer, most teams don't have the cap space to offer a contract worth that much and aren't willing to give up the draft capital to do so.
Beniers will re-sign with the Kraken and it's just a matter of time at this point. An offer sheet feels nearly impossible and both he and the team have stated multiple times that they want to get a deal done.
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