ANAHEIM, Calif. – This was the nightmare scenario playing in the background all season long for the Anaheim Ducks.
With the Philadelphia Flyers tendering a five-year, $18 million-per-season offer sheet that would make Leo Carlsson the highest-paid player in the NHL, Ducks general manager Pat Verbeek is on the verge of losing his 21-year-old franchise center or putting a major dent into Anaheim’s salary cap flexibility.
If the Carlsson deal hits Anaheim’s books, the Ducks will have just $17 million in remaining cap space to sign its other restricted free agents in leading goal-scorer Cutter Gauthier, who is not eligible for an offer sheet due to lack of service time, and defensemen Pavel Mintyukov and Tyson Hinds. (Now, the vultures are already circling on Mintyukov, as well.)
It was reported yesterday that the Ducks would match any offer sheet tendered to Carlsson, and they still have seven days to do so. If Anaheim does not match, they’d receive the Flyer’s next four first-round picks, but it should not have come to this.
This was another entirely avoidable situation for Verbeek, whose notoriously hardball negotiating tactics have finally come back to bite Anaheim.
In his postseason exit interview on May 16 after a season of putting negotiations to the side to focus on the playoff race, Verbeek said he wanted to get negotiations with Carlsson and Gauthier done as soon as possible.
“In a perfect scenario, I‘d like to get them done in a week here,” Verbeek said. "I’m hoping for the best to try and make sure everybody’s excited for training camp and all of us are happy. Unfortunately, I don’t have a crystal ball to say how it’s going to go.”
“I’d like to get it done as soon as possible, but we all have to cooperate with one another. That’s the goal.”
With exit interviews coming less than 24 hours after the end of the Ducks’ season, both Carlsson and Gauthier said there hadn’t been talks or much thought about the summer’s negotiations. Both had the same refrain.
“We’ll see what happens,” Carlsson said. “You obviously want to get it done before training camp.”
“We’ll see what happens,” Gauthier said. “We have a handful of months before camp starts up again. I don’t think it’ll be an issue, but you never know. We’ll see what happens.”
What’s happened is rather than dragging out a summer-long fight, Carlsson has forced Verbeek’s hand.
And there is certainly some onus on Carlsson here. Just because the Flyers offered the deal doesn’t mean he has to take it and start that ticking seven-day clock. Carlsson and his agent both know the situation that $18 million figure puts the Ducks in. Not just against the cap, but in setting the bar that Gauthier, Mintyukov and Beckett Sennecke down the line can negotiate against.
However, with Verbeek on the other side, there’s simply less benefit of the doubt. If Carlsson wanted his number, he had learned would not come quickly.
Aside from the eight-year, $9 million-per-season deal signed by Jackson LaCombe during last season’s training camp–LaCombe was also set to be an RFA this summer–and Lukáś Dostál's contract last summer, which also had the deadline of arbitration hearings, negotiations with the Ducks top RFAs under Verbeek have been lengthy, down-to-the wire and a bit nip-and-tuck.
In Verbeek’s second summer in Anaheim, Troy Terry was an arbitration-eligible RFA, and with the two sides minutes away from entering the arbitration hearing in August 2022, Terry signed a seven-year deal with the Ducks.
The next summer, contract negotiations with RFAs Jamie Drysdale and Trevor Zegras–both Flyers now, coincidentally–dragged deep into training camp before signing deals just ahead of the regular season.
Last offseason, Mason McTavish’s RFA talks also lingered into training camp with McTavish sitting out until his six-year deal was signed on Sept. 27, just days before LaCombe’s deal got done early.
When that round of negotiations was done, eyes turned toward this summer, knowing that Carlsson, Gauthier, Mintyukov and, at the time, LaCombe were all coming due. Verbeek was asked about working ahead.
“We're looking internally,” Verbeek said. “I'm seeing if we can get some out of the way before next summer. It could be a situation where guys want to wait till the year's over, and we can approach it that way, or might be a couple of guys that will look into it and want to explore it.”
LaCombe then signed five days later, which prompted the question of if this quick work could be expected with the rest of that upcoming crop.
“Jackson's the first domino to fall,” Verbeek said. “We're working on other stuff as well, so we'll see what happens. As last week (with McTavish), things can change pretty quickly, so we'll just keep getting after it.”
No deals got done before the season, talks did not occur during the season and now, no deals got done before July 1, opening the Ducks to these outside incursions.
Time and time again, Verbeek engaged in these battles with RFAs, leveraging the team’s rights for manageable contracts against the salary cap. To some degree, that is his job and just part of the business, and it’s mostly worked in the Ducks’ favor. (Although, one could note that three of the players in those negotiations were traded away not long after those deals.)
But to the degrees in which Verbeek has waged these wars, and seemed prepared to do with this player, it’s put the Ducks into a tough spot.
As previously mentioned, the Ducks would be down to $17 million in cap space if they match for Carlsson’s deal. If McTavish had not been traded a week ago, Anaheim would have been down to $10 million in salary cap space, which would have been impossibly tight with Gauthier and Mintyukov still to come.
Most in the hockey world had pegged Gauthier to come in at around $10-12 million per season and Mintyukov around $4-5 million. With Carlsson coming in at $18 million, there has to be some doubt if those Gauthier and Mintyukov numbers hold, and for those doing the math, any increase would make things too tight for comfort for Anaheim.
Again, Gauthier is not eligible for an offer sheet, which gives the Ducks more control there, but as mentioned, Mintyukov can be tendered an offer sheet. While Mintyukov’s number is the smaller of the two, Anaheim may end up being in a spot where they don’t have the room to comfortably match on Mintyukov if they match on Carlsson.
Elsewhere on the roster and the salary cap, it was also reported that the Ducks haven't been as aggressive in free agency because they didn't know where they'd stand after signing Carlsson, Gauthier and Mintyukov. Anaheim lost all three of its veteran right-handed defensemen. Carlsson's right wing on the top line–Troy Terry–is out until December at the earliest following hip surgery. There are other needs on the roster that may end up not being filled because of this mishandling.
If the Ducks don’t match, they will have lost their 2021 No. 3 overall pick in McTavish and their 2023 No. 2 overall pick in Carlsson in the span of two weeks. Anaheim would have six first-round picks to show for it–two picks from St. Louis that the Ducks used in last Friday’s draft and four over the next four years from Philadelphia–but that’s an unimaginable blow to a team that finally emerged from the rebuilding darkness.
Verbeek addressed that idea of losing supposed franchise cornerstones for more future promises last week after the McTavish trade.
“I think that sometimes it looks like we're taking a step back,” Verbeek said, “but there's other ways to address needs in our organization for the future.”
This would be an unquestionable step back. No matter what justifications are said. No matter what compensation is recouped.
Unless that compensation and cap space are swung for some humongous unseen move–Auston Matthews or Connor McDavid could be pried from their current locations soon–there is nothing that would make losing Leo Carlsson feel okay.
And really, even if Carlsson is matched, this offer sheet is a stain on Verbeek’s tenure. What remains to be seen is if it’s merely a blemish or a generational spill.