RIP: Offer Sheets!

1) The Weber offer sheet matching is still reverberating throughout the NHL. As we wrote last week, really only surprise in this issue is how many bloggers and journalists were surprised by Nashville matching this. Most assumed the price was too steep to pay. However, what they failed to realize the price to pay to NOT match the offer would have been steeper! For IF Nashville allowed their captain to walk they would in our opinion cease to exist as a legitimate NHL franchise and their days in The Music City would be numbered. After losing Suter, they simply couldn’t lose Weber too.

2) The  real reverberations of this will be that this will probably be the last BIG offer sheet we will see. For if the Flyers were unable to pry Weber away with such an enormous sum (27 million in 1 year) from a low budget team, then it would appear impossible for a team to succeed in that endeavor. Sure (assuming offer sheets are part of the new CBA) we will probably  still see smaller offer sheets from time to time, but the big named RFA's will forever more be "free agents" in name only. Additionally, if contracts are term limited to 5 years, and bonuses/front loading are made illegal, then the big money teams will have lost their advantage and all teams will generally be on equal footing with regard to keeping their stars until they are UFA's.