The Angst of Restricted Free Agency and Offer Sheets
The Buffalo Sabres have a bevy of RFAs to contend with and it's not always a walk in the park to try and secure one's future.
What must it be like to be in your early-20s and to have the opportunity to sign the first of hopefully a handful of life-altering contracts? When you think about where you were at 21 or 22 years old, there’s probably a lot that either you’ve forgotten about or events that occurred that you absolutely were not prepared to face.
Being a professional athlete at that age and having agent representation to handle the business side of things along with an (ideally) supportive family group is certainly a luxury, but the decisions made are still your own. For NHL players entering restricted free agency for the first (or even second) time, it’s an exhaustive and exhilarating moment when their career takes its next big step.
Signing a contract worth a lot of money sounds like it would be simple, and sometimes it is. For the Buffalo Sabres this summer, they’ve got more than a few restricted free agents to negotiate new contracts with. Long-term or short-term is to be determined, but for J-J Peterka, Bo Byram, Ryan McLeod, Jack Quinn, Jacob Bernard-Docker, Tyson Kozak and Devon Levi it’s time for a raise.
The process isn’t anything new for Byram, McLeod or Bernard-Docker, but for Byram and McLeod it’s their opportunity to cash in and sizably so. It’s also their opportunity to get job security with a longer deal.
Before the players headed home for the summer at the end of the season, Byram and McLeod said they preferred to leave the business side of hockey to their agents to handle. In Byram’s situation, he changed his representation from Kevin Epp to Darren Ferris.
Ferris represents some of this summer’s biggest free agents-to-be including Toronto’s Mitch Marner and Florida’s Sam Bennett and he also represents a few former Sabres in Zach Bogosian, Evan Rodrigues and Taylor Hall. He’s a heavy hitter. McLeod, meanwhile, is repped by Joseph Resnick whose portfolio of clients is a bit more modest, highlighted by Seattle’s Jared McCann and Columbus captain Boone Jenner.
Agents are professionals at this for a host of reasons but being able to balance the nuances of personalities both with their clients and the general managers and keep things as calm as possible while negotiating for life-changing money means a lot of players trust them implicitly and for good reason.
“My agent’s (Craig Oster) been in business a long time, so I just trusted him,” Sabres captain Rasmus Dahlin said. “I gave my agents all the trust. They said, ‘This is your market value and we’re going to try and get you this.’”
Dahlin didn’t have to sweat out being a restricted free agent, of course. He signed a three-year, $18 million contract after his entry-level deal ended and he inked his eight-year, $88 million extension before that expired. And even though Dahlin still got to have that brief RFA experience, some guys get to avoid it completely.
“I was offered an extension right at the beginning of my second year with Vegas,” Alex Tuch said. “I was brought into George McPhee’s office and sat down with him and Kelly McCrimmon. I was actually injured at the time and I thought I was going to be told not to do anything stupid when they’re on the road or something, but he asked me if I liked it here and if I saw myself staying here for a long time if I’d be willing to maybe negotiate for an extension and I obviously said ‘yes’ really excited I talked to my agents (Brian & Scott Bartlett) on the phone three times over the course of 48 hours and then it was done. It was pretty cut and dried, there was a couple of comparisons, honest, that were spot-on. We didn’t bring in a number and say this is what we want. It was like, ‘What do you guys have to offer, how much are you willing to go up,’ and then it was done from there.”
It was October 2018 when Tuch signed his seven-year, $33.25 million extension, a deal that comes to an end next summer when he’s eligible to become an unrestricted free agent but is eligible to sign an extension with Buffalo on July 1.
“You also realize during those contract negotiations how much of a business it really is,” Tuch said. “I was young and naïve, and they offered me more money than I ever thought I’d make in my entire life and I signed it right away. I don’t ever have any regrets. Maybe play the year out, maybe see how it went. I had a pretty good year that year, too, so maybe I would’ve gotten a little bit more… You can always look and say, ‘what if, what if, what if,’ but I’m happy.”
Having strong representation in dealing with negotiations is important because it can be a lot more difficult for restricted free agents to gain leverage in talks. After all, the team owns their rights which takes away the option of saying, “Well, this team is thinking about this number…” when negotiating.
Players can gain leverage as RFAs by way of signing an offer sheet from another team, but a move like that tends to make people upset. General managers, owners, teammates, fans - everyone seems to get sore when a player and team make use of the options available to them. Team culture is such a massive intangible thing in hockey and even though offer sheets exist in other sports and are used without it being viewed as a Shakespearean tragedy at the Globe Theatre.
Offer sheets are possible for all of the Sabres RFAs apart from Devon Levi and even though the Sabres are about $23.2 million under the $95.5 million salary cap at the moment according to PuckPedia, it’s a cushion that should make them immune to the threat of offer sheets. This is where the logic of that comes into conflict with how well below the salary cap upper limit they’ve stayed since 2020.
If a team wanted to test the Sabres’ fiscal resolve and love of their best players, they could approach them with an offer sheet that does just that. Offer sheets can also be designed to cause maximum pain on the rights-holding team, too. It’s hard to not think back on the offer sheet Shea Weber signed with the Philadelphia Flyers in the summer of 2012. The Flyers did everything they could to make it painful for the Nashville Predators with their 14-year, $110 million monster contract, one that finally expires after the end of the 2025-2026 season. Not ever offer sheet is that predatory, but that’s a cartoonish example of how things used to work.
An offer sheet is more of a clandestine threat from the netherworld given how rarely they’re deployed, but after the St. Louis Blues signed Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg to offer sheets away from the Edmonton Oilers last summer, it’s at the front of everyone’s mind again.
There’s a lot more that goes into signing an offer sheet aside from the business side of it, though.
Ryan O’Reilly was a restricted free agent coming out of the 2012 lockout after his entry-level deal ended after the 2011-2012 season. Negotiations with the Colorado Avalanche and O’Reilly didn’t progress well once the league was back in session in early 2013 and Calgary Flames then GM Jay Feaster attempted to put the screws to the Avalanche with an offer sheet that came in at two years, $12 million, a $6 million cap hit. It was a massive raise, and one Colorado management wasn’t pleased with.
“One thing I feel bad about, too, because I know a lot of teammates and guys I played with who didn’t know the situation think I held out and rightfully so,” O’Reilly said. “I think I trusted my agent, and I’m not regretting anything. I think everything happened and it is what it is, I’m not unhappy with it, but you just trust your agent that he’s going to be able to get the biggest deal and something like that, it’s important, too, but I think it did ruffle a lot of feathers.”
O’Reilly’s situation was very particular.
The lockout threw a lot of things out of whack and with the league closed down by the owners, O’Reilly went to Russia and played 12 games with Magnitogorsk in the KHL before the NHLPA and NHL settled on a deal. Once the league was back in action, O’Reilly remained unsigned. As a 22-year-old RFA, the view widely held around the sport was you either re-sign with your team or you’re a problem. That world view didn’t just belong to executives though. Things have changed a little bit these days, but not much.
“People go, ‘Does he even want to be here? Is he a selfish guy,’” O’Reilly said. “It would’ve been nice to be more involved and be smarter about the way things were handled. I don’t think it could’ve necessarily changed anything but at least have the dialogue where it was at—and with teammates, too—with what I was doing. It definitely was a unique situation that I know people probably still have a bad taste in their mouth about it and rightfully so. It is a business and, I don’t regret anything, but it’s tough when things like that destroy relationships with people you have or upset people and that’s not something you want to do.”
This could be viewed as a cautionary tale of sorts, although the thought of a lockout interrupting a season and causing free agency havoc hasn’t been in anyone’s mind ever since the 2013 settlement happened. Things couldn’t be better league-wide and the surging salary cap is proof of that.
That said, when there’s more money to be had and a lot of owners eager to spend it to get a Stanley Cup, that’s a net positive for the players. Yes, star players will cash in but the mid-level guys will too, mostly because so many top players get locked up long-term as soon as teams can make it happen. With the cap rising so much so fast, short-term deals might become all the rage.
Money talks and everyone always listens and for the Sabres to get business done the best way possible for themselves, they do have to be mindful, to a point, about how they spend their money. They cannot run it back next season with virtually the same roster apart from a couple tweaks or call-ups. That dog won’t hunt.
With so many key players for the current day and the future hanging in the balance awaiting a new contract and with rumors running rampant about desire levels regarding staying in Buffalo to be part of the solution, there could be movement that was unexpected when the season ended, and players headed home for summer.
If those rumors prove to be untrue and Peterka isn’t going anywhere and/or Byram stays, then the focus of getting them re-signed gets a lot simpler. If there is truth, however, the Sabres offseason becomes starkly different and far more worrisome.