Protecting yourself from offer sheet retaliation
Over Drive: Back in 2016, the Florida Panthers were looking to offer sheet Tampa Bay Lightning’s Nikita Kucherov, according to former Panthers AGM Steve Wernier. When leading up to trying to offer sheeting someone, there is a lot of work you need to do. You need to make sure your own group is signed in case the team is looking to retaliate. The Carolina Hurricanes have looked at offer sheeting players, and they make sure their players are signed.
** NHLRumors.com transcription
Aaron Korolnek: “Nikita Kucherov, when you were with the Florida Panthers, and that drew a lot of eyebrows, raised a lot of eyebrows. Can you explain the behind-the-scenes, the due diligence you do when you’re putting an offer sheet together? Because it’s a lot more than just the contract and the front-loading and the money. There’s a lot of due diligence behind the scenes, just beyond that, that then, then meets the eye, correct?
Werier: “Yeah. There’s a lot of work. Like, you really want to make sure you keep your side of the street clean too, right? Like, and when I say that, I mean when we were looking at doing an offer sheet in the summer of 2016, what I made sure we did leading up to that summer is, we locked up all of our core players who might be targeted, even though offer sheets weren’t too common back then.
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Like we had (Aleksander) Barkov, (Aaron) Ekblad, (Jonathan) Huberdeau, Vincent Trocheck, Reilly Smith. And there’s a reason we signed all those guys before that summer when we were thinking about offer sheeting Kucherov, because you know, once the cat’s out of the bag, and especially once you’re the team launching that offer sheet. It’s a copycat will league. Teams will come after you, and we weren’t prepared to lose one of those players, especially if that offer sheet got matched and someone retaliated. And you know that’s still pretty common plays.
Like Anaheim, you know has some vulnerability coming up too. But you look at a team like Carolina. Carolina’s been super aggressive in the last two years, right? They went after (Evan) Bouchard. They basically got K’Andre Miller under threat of an offer sheet in New York, and then they structured a deal.
But it’s no coincidence Carolina’s been super proactive in locking up, you know, the (Logan) Stankoven’s, the Jackson Blake’s, even the Brandon Bussi’s, to make sure that, as aggressive as they are, they aren’t sort of vulnerable to retaliation easily.”
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