What lessons will the rest of the NHL learn from the Jesperi Kotkaniemi offer sheet?

The Carolina Hurricanes offer sheet to Jesperi Kotkaniemi has become the talk of the NHL. While that’s not an especially high bar in August, this is a pretty irresistible story for a hockey fan. It’s got the novelty of the rarely seen offer sheet, some genuine intrigue over how it will all play out, and a solid dose of pettiness to add to the mix.

That last bit is the angle that’s getting most of the attention these days, and rightly so given how clearly this move was inspired by the Habs’ 2019 offer sheet to Sebastian Aho. NHL front offices are filled with bitter grumps with long memories, but they’re usually not this over-the-top. From the $20 signing bonus to the word-for-for press release, apparently the Hurricanes don’t do subtle.

But while I can appreciate some junior high-level drama as much as the next guy, I’m wondering about a different angle: Where does the NHL go from here? After all, this a copycat league that’s notorious for GMs reacting to anything that happens by immediately shifting strategy to… well, something different. Sometimes they learn the right lesson. Often, they don’t. So what are NHL GMs going to talk themselves into after watching this whole mess unfold from their cottages?

I’m not sure, but I’ve got a few possibilities. Let’s work through how this might play out.

Lesson 1: Offer sheets are too dangerous, never try them

This one’s simple. The Canadiens’ offer sheet to Aho was the first one the league had seen in six years, and the biggest since Shea Weber in 2012. In between, hockey fans were left wondering why nobody was using a powerful weapon that was sitting right there in the rulebook. We could argue over whether Montreal’s move had any chance of succeeding – it didn’t – but at least they tried, which is more than you can say for anyone else.

And now, they have their reward: A retaliatory offer sheet aimed at one of their key young players. The lesson, it would seem, is to stay away from offer sheets entirely. You’ll just about never get the player, you get your fans’ hopes up for nothing, and you might just be putting a target on your own RFAs a year or two down the line.

Let’s be honest, we’re all pretty sure that this is the lesson that NHL GMs will end up learning from all this. But is it the right one?

Maybe, but there’s one problem with that theory: We’ve been hearing about the risk of retaliatory offer sheets for years. It comes up every summer, as yet another crop of top-tier RFAs would come and go without a single attempt. When fans would wonder why GMs were so hesitant to even try an offer sheet, one of the first reasons offered was always the threat of payback. But it basically never happened; before this weekend, the last time a team tried a retribution-based offer sheet was in 2008, when the Blues responded to the Canucks signing David Backes by going after Steve Bernier.

That was it. The Predators never went after a Flyer after the Weber offer. The Avs didn’t target any Flames after Ryan O’Reilly. The Sabres didn’t go after any Oilers after Thomas Vanek. Until this week, a GM who tried an offer sheet had as much chance of being challenged to a barn fight as they did of facing a return attempt. But they kept bringing it up anyway, hiding behind a mostly imagined threat as a reason to avoid doing their jobs.

Now it’s finally happened. But it sure seems like the fear of this kind of situation was already baked into whatever calculations teams were doing. It was the monster under the bed that they were already afraid of. Now that the monster is real, does that really change anything?

It might, which is why we’re all assuming that we’ll hear this excuse even more often in the coming years. But in the interest of encouraging GMs to keep their options open, let’s see if we can flip this one around…

Lesson 2: Offer sheets can actually work, so use them more

All those offer sheets we mentioned in the last section were matched. So was every offer sheet of the last 24 years, with one exception: the infamous Dustin Penner deal in 2007, which led to the Brian Burke/Kevin Lowe feud. Penner was a decent player in his day, but he wasn’t exactly anyone’s idea of a star. The last genuine difference-maker to switch teams after an offer sheet was… geez, does Chris Gratton in 1997 count? Shayne Corson in 95? Do we have to go all the way back to the Scott Stevens/Brendan Shanahan days in the early 90s?

You get the point. Offer sheets just don’t work. The incentive for teams to hold onto their own RFAs is just too high. That’s always been the system’s biggest problem. Why bother signing another team’s star to an offer sheet that won’t work? Sure, you can mess with their cap situation a bit, but that’s about the only benefit. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time, because teams always match.

Except along comes the Kotkaniemi deal, and the Habs… might not?

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)

The Athletic Hockey Show: What if?

On this week's special "what if?" episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- What if Gretzky stays in Edmonton?
- What i the Sabres win the McDavid lottery?
- What if the linesman doesn't miss Duchene's offside?
- What if Patrik Stefan scores into that empty net?
- What if Don Waddell back-stabbed Brian Burke at the Sedin draft?
- And more...

The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)

Is it possible to build a six-man starting lineup of NHL players whose names all rhyme?

It’s the dead zone of the offseason, so you know we’re getting weird. It’s fine, all the important people are at a cottage, we can do whatever we want and nobody will notice.

Today, that means tackling a simple question: Can we come up with a six-man starting lineup of well-known NHL players where all of their last names rhyme?

Plot twist: This turns out to not be such a simple question after all. But for once, it’s not because the answer is hard to find, although (spoiler alert) it’s that too.

Instead, it’s that apparently we can spend a lot of time arguing over what it means for something to rhyme. I kind of assumed that was a straightforward concept, but I ended up going down a rabbit-hole of literary and linguistic theory, and learning about terms like perfect and imperfect rhymes, not to mention slant rhymes and eye rhymes and whether a rhyme is masculine and feminine.

I did not appreciate any of this, because I’m a sportswriter, which means I made a commitment to stop learning new things a decade ago. But it became clear that we could make this whole thing way too easy if we went with the looser definitions, like just looking for matching final syllables. Screw that. Gretzky doesn’t rhyme with Crosby and Neely and Selanne, and we’re not making a team of guys whose last names all end in “son” or “ov” or “chuk”. What, you want to do things the easy way? Is this your first day here? Full-name rhymes only or get out.

We’re also going to note the obvious rule that matching names don’t rhyme (so no team made up of Sutters), and neither do different names that sound the same when spoken out loud (so no Billy Smith and Ryan Smyth). The one concession we’ll make is to go with generally accepted pronunciations and be a little lenient on what counts as a match, so please don’t fill the comment section with explanations of the etymology of subtle differences between two names from different regions of the world.

We need three forwards, two defensemen and a goalie, and we’re looking for perfect rhymes using names today’s fans might have heard of. Can it be done?

As we like to say around these parts in August: This is completely pointless, let’s do it.

I started the search with what seemed like an obvious strategy: Focus on one-syllable names. If we’re saying the whole thing has to rhyme, then lets keep that whole thing as short as possible, right? And as luck would have it, there are plenty of one-syllable names on the list of hockey royalty, so if we want to build around a star then we should be in good shape.

For example…

Attempt #1: Team Hall

This one has all sorts of potential, both because the name is nice and simple and lends itself well to rhymes, and also because we have the flexibility of starting with either Glenn Hall in goal or Taylor Hall up front. And we can immediately drop in another modern-day star in Eric Staal.

From there, though, the trail goes cold on us. We said we wanted a roster of six reasonably well-know players, and while Team Hall could open its doors to lesser-known NHLers like Kevin Dahl, Terry Ball, Bob Wall and current depth guy Nick Paul, it wouldn’t really seem like a worth entry. Let’s look elsewhere…

Attempt #2: Team Orr

There’s some momentary excitement when we realize we can start with a blueline of Bobby Orr and Eddie Shore, but it’s only temporary. We could put Jamie Storr in net, but Jay More was a defenseman and we’re already set there. There isn’t much else to work with that I can find, and while I have no doubt that I’ll miss some candidates here and there as we go through this, I don’t think there’s enough to work with on Team Orr.

Attempt #3: Team Clarke

Another strong start here, as we can build around a pair of 1970s Hall-of-Famers in Bobby Clarke and Brad Park. But again, that initial excitement wears off quickly, as we have to break the news to the comic book crowd that there’s never been a Stark in the NHL. There has been a Mark (90s defenseman Gordon) and a Dark (a few games in the 80s from defenseman Michael), but that’s about it.

The old-timers are letting us down. Let’s see if we have better luck with something a little more modern…

Attempt #4: Team Stone

We have a sold foundation up front with Mark Stone and Shane Doan, which is a decent start. I’m not sure if we can get away with Travis Moen for the third forward slot, but that’s OK because there was an Original Six-era forward named Tod Sloan who played for 13 seasons and was a Hart runner-up one year. That’s a solid top line.

From there, though, I’m not sure where to go. The NHL has never had a Cone, and our dumb rules that I’m already regretting keep us from using a Malone or Varone. So chalk this one up as another false start.

At this point, we’re starting to realize that this is going to be tougher than it seemed, which won’t be a surprise to anyone who’s a regular to Offseason DGB content. I don’t think we even get off the ground with some other well-known one-syllable NHL names, like Hull or Howe or Roy. Come to think of it, that last one might not even be one syllable depending on how French the person saying it is trying to be. This whole thing may have been a bad idea.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)

The Athletic Hockey Show: The Hall of Fame debate episode

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Ian and I face off on some of the toughest Hockey Hall of Fame debates
- Thoughts on Mike Vernon, Chris Osgood, and the Hall being weird about goalies
- Neither of us can come up with a good reason why Alexander Mogilny isn't in
- Ian makes the case for Daniel Alfredsson, and I do not
- And lots more...

The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)

Mailbag: Casting an NHL season of Survivor, rare jersey numbers, and the worst-case scenario for the Leafs

It’s August and nothing is happening. Let’s open up the mailbag and argue about reality TV, bigger nets and how bad it can really get for this year’s Leafs.

Note: Submitted questions have been edited for clarity and style.

You’ve mentioned on the podcast a couple times that you and the family are big Survivor fans, so you seem like the ideal person to bring the NHL and Survivor together. Which current NHLers (players/coaches/executives) would make the best pre-merge tribe? – Scott A.

This is true. Survivor is like the only regularly scheduled program my family watches (everything else in YouTube, Netflix or sports). So yeah, let’s take a crack at a ten-person tribe.

To state the obvious, we’re not looking for the ten best Survivor players. That would be boring. Instead, we need to check all the boxes in a typical reality show lineup. Here’s the best I can come up with, although I’d want to hear some alternate versions in the comments.

Nathan MacKinnon: The guy who seems cool at first and takes a leadership position but turns out to be out of his mind and eventually makes half his tribe hate him, even though nobody will say that to his face because they’re secretly terrified of him.

P.K. Subban: The super-charismatic dude who is immediately loved by half the tribe and hated by the other half.

Brad Marchand: The guy who’s super annoying and knows it, and uses that to drive everyone else out of their minds and probably ends up winning.

Joe Thornton: The lovable goofball who everyone wants to keep around even though he gets winded a few seconds into every challenge.

Marc-Andre Fleury: The super-nice guy everyone is rooting for who gets blindsided in the season’s saddest moment.

Phil Kessel: The awkward guy who looks like he’s never done a sit-up in his life but turns out to be amazing at challenges and kind of makes you feel bad about yourself for some reason.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

(Want to read this post on The Athletic for free? Sign up for a free trial.)