Ducks Match Record $90M Offer Sheet to Keep Carlsson, But Cap Crunch Looms

The Philadelphia Flyers tried to steal Leo Carlsson. The Anaheim Ducks said no thank you, matched the offer, and now get to figure out how to build a playoff roster with the most expensive contract in NHL history sitting at the top of their cap sheet.

Anaheim matched the Flyers' five-year, $90 million offer sheet for the 21-year-old center on Thursday, as reported by ESPN and confirmed by NHL.com. The deal carries an average annual value of $18 million, topping the previous record of $17 million set by Minnesota's Kirill Kaprizov heading into last season.

The Flyers had tendered the offer on July 3. Under the NHL's collective bargaining agreement, Anaheim had seven days to decide. They used most of them. But the result was never really in doubt: according to ESPN, Ducks GM Pat Verbeek had told his peers privately he would match any offer sheet for Carlsson, even if the final number caught him off guard.

"Did we expect the offer sheet to be this high? No. We did not see that one coming," Verbeek told reporters Thursday, per ESPN.

Nobody did. As CBC Sports reported, Carlsson's new deal is worth significantly more than even he had indicated he would accept as a restricted free agent. The structure of it is unusual, too. According to ESPN, the contract is built almost entirely around signing bonuses, with just $4.7 million in base salary over five years and roughly $85.3 million paid out as bonuses. Carlsson will collect nearly $20 million in year one alone.

Carlsson did his part on the ice to earn the payday. He scored 29 goals and 67 points in 70 games this past regular season, helping Anaheim reach the playoffs for the first time since 2018. In the postseason, he added four goals and 11 assists across 12 games before the Ducks fell in the second round to Vegas, per ESPN.

As for Carlsson himself, he was diplomatic about the whole business. "It's a lot of business in hockey," he told reporters, as quoted by both ESPN and CBC Sports. "I knew it, obviously, but it's more business than I thought."

The Flyers, meanwhile, go home empty-handed. General manager Danny Briere rolled the dice on an offer sheet, a rarely-deployed tool in NHL free agency, hoping Anaheim's ownership would flinch at the bill. Billionaire owner Henry Samueli did not flinch. Per ESPN, Samueli and his wife Susan called it "an easy decision."

Briere's gambit failed to land the player, but it may have done something arguably more disruptive to the league: it reset the market for young NHL centers in a way that will echo through negotiations for years. As CBC Sports noted, future talks will reveal whether Briere significantly skewed NHL valuations of young talent by going so far above what the market expected.

And now Verbeek gets to live with the consequences of his own negotiating history. CBC Sports pointed out that the whole mess was avoidable. Verbeek claimed he made serious offers last September to Carlsson, Cutter Gauthier, and defenseman Jackson LaCombe, but felt he was being slow-walked to July 1, when an offer sheet could be signed. Gauthier, a 41-goal scorer, still doesn't have a new deal. Verbeek told ESPN he has two and a half months to figure out how to fit Gauthier under the cap, possibly by dumping veteran salary.

The Maple Leafs' front-office purge this week under new GM John Chayka grabbed the bigger headlines, but the Carlsson saga is the story that matters more to the league's business structure. A 21-year-old coming off his entry-level deal just became the highest-paid player in NHL history, and he got there because a rebuilding team in Philadelphia was desperate enough to use a nuclear option.

Somebody's cap sheet is going to feel this for the next five years. Right now it's Anaheim's.

Sources cited:
- ESPN (https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/49316039/ducks-match-flyers-five-year-90m-offer-leo-carlsson)
- NHL.com (https://www.nhl.com/news/topic/free-agency/leo-carlsson-signs-5-year-contract-with-ducks-match-flyers-offer-sheet)
- CBC Sports (https://www.cbc.ca/sports/hockey/nhl/leo-carlsson-offer-sheet-matched-ducks-flyers-nhl-9.7264699)