Just when we thought this offseason couldn’t get any zanier…

The Philadelphia Flyers shocked the entire NHL, but especially the Anaheim Ducks, when they made a five-year, $90 million offer sheet to 21-year-old centre Leo Carlsson. The offer sheet, whether it stays with the Flyers or is matched by the Ducks, will give Carlsson both the highest contract AAV ($18 million) and the highest single-season guaranteed salary ($20.8 million for 2026-27) in NHL history.

Or, should we say, the highest so far…

It’s not quite the largest offer sheet in NHL history. That still goes to the whopping 14-year offer that these same Flyers once made Shea Weber. But the Carlsson offer might just go down as the most consequential offer sheet of all-time, as it might have just started a trend.

To be fair, Carlsson’s offer sheet was not even the first of this offseason. A day prior, the New Jersey Devils sent a much smaller one-year offer sheet to Barrett Hayton of the Utah Mammoth. But that’s a vastly different situation to what has unfolded between the Flyers and Ducks.

What happened there is more akin to thievery. The Flyers are attempting to use the fact that the offer sheet compensation pyramid has no ceiling – meaning that an $11.94 million AAV offer sheet counts the same as this $18 million one – to effectively steal away an incredibly rare asset. Carlsson is already a 1C, has his whole career ahead of him, and might have 100-point potential. There are only a handful of players like him in the league right now. Is he worth $18 million a year? Probably not, but the Flyers have made the cost of acquisition part of their calculus here.

If successful, they’ll have stolen away Carlsson for the cost of four first-round picks and five years of an at least somewhat overpriced contract.

For someone like Carlsson, that seems worth it. And the only potential consequence here, aside from a little ostracization from other GMs, is that Anaheim matches the offer sheet. At this point, you’ve burdened an up-and-coming team with that same overpriced contract and otherwise cost yourself nothing.

All of which means that the Carlsson offer sheet is not going to be the last of its kind. Some pundits are predicting that another big-name offer sheet could come as early as later in this same offseason, and if not, then surely over the next few.

This could have major implications for the Vancouver Canucks, who stand to be fairly RFA-heavy in the years to come.

It is not a present-day issue. The Canucks somewhat notably did not qualify any of their pending restricted free agents, and so do not have any RFAs on their current roster. But they do have some folks who will reach that status as of the summer of 2027 and are currently eligible for an extension. Those are the players the Canucks need to start considering as potential future targets for such predatory offer sheets, and they also need to take proactive steps to protect them.

The most proactive step available is to simply sign those players to lengthy extensions before they ever even get the chance to hit RFA.

When we talk about this, we’re not just talking about any ol’ RFA. The ones that are most at risk of being ‘Carlsson’ed’ will be, like Carlsson, premium young NHL talents. For the Canucks right now, that primarily means Zeev Buium, their 20-year-old top LD and centrepiece of the Quinn Hughes return.

Buium has been eligible for an extension since July 1, but talk of one has been relatively quiet. What has not been quiet are those in the fanbase and mediasphere who have been clamouring for the Canucks to lock Buium up as early as possible and as long as possible.

This offseason will be the last in which teams are eligible to sign their own players to eight-year contracts. Buium, along with fellow 2027 RFAs like Elias Pettersson and Liam Öhgren, will be the last individuals that the Canucks are allowed to sign to truly long-term deals. That’s part of the calculus of wanting to get Buium signed until 2035.

But these offer sheets also introduce a two-prong, double-edged threat to RFAs in general that should provide any extra push the Canucks might need.

The first threat is the clear and direct threat of another offer sheet, but strangely enough, that does not apply to Buium. Should the Canucks let Buium’s contract expire at the end of the 2026-27 season, he’ll indeed become an RFA as of July 1, 2027. But because his ‘first’ NHL season consisted of four playoff games for the Minnesota Wild in 2024-25, he didn’t hit the 10-game threshold to have that counted as a full professional season. Thus, the 2026-27 season will be Buium’s second official one, and players who sign their first contracts between the ages of 18 and 21 need three pro seasons to be eligible for offer sheets.

Buium will instead be what is called a 10.2C RFA, which essentially means an RFA ineligible for offer sheets.

Pettersson, Öhgren, Jonathan Lekkerimäki, Aatu Räty and the rest of the 2027 RFA gang would be eligible, but they’re significantly smaller potatoes than Buium.

It’s the second side of the threat that the Canucks should be most concerned about here, and that’s the general inflation that this offer sheet, and the possibility of others to follow, will have on the salaries of RFAs.

Restricted free agency used to be an unofficial method of salary control in the NHL. Once players got old enough to hit unrestricted free agency, the free market tended to blow their salaries up like zeppelins. But the difficulty of an RFA moving teams had an impact on an RFA’s ability to get paid in a similar way. This was always a bit strange, as the RFA years (20-27ish) tend to line up more with a player’s best years than anything else.

The Carlsson offer sheet blows that whole idea out of the water. It won’t even necessarily take more offer sheets like it for the effects to be felt. Look at Chicago and Columbus right now. They’ve got the other centres taken at the top of the 2023 Entry Draft in Connor Bedard and Adam Fantilli. Some are predicting they’ll be the next to be sent offer sheets, if they haven’t already. But it won’t take an offer sheet to harm the Blackhawks and Blue Jackets’ ability to negotiate here. All it takes is either Bedard or Fantilli to point to Carlsson as a reasonable comparable for themselves and say “I want to be paid like that guy.” This happens a few times over, it starts to perpetuate itself, and suddenly we’ve got a real boom in RFA salaries, which alters the NHL’s whole salary structure from here on out.

Long story short, RFA extensions are about to become more expensive, and that’s going to become more true the more weeks, months, and years come to pass. If the Canucks let Buium reach RFA status in 2027, they don’t have to worry about an offer sheet, but they do have to worry about a bevy of other RFAs demanding higher comparative salaries, which naturally leads to Buium asking more himself. The worry is less Buium signing an offer sheet, and more about his comparables doing so.

Sign Buium to an eight-year deal now, and it will almost certainly result in the Canucks having something on their hands that looks more and more like a bargain as it ages. Delay, and you can start tacking extra millions onto that future AAV.

We’ve spoken mostly about Buium here, but there are others to consider. Tom Willander becomes an RFA in 2028. Depending on when he signs his ELC out of college, Caleb Malhotra could be there as soon as 2029. And surely there are others who will push themselves into this conversation in the interim.

The message should be loud and clear here: identify your top young players now, and sign them as soon as possible for as long as possible. We recently shouted out the Montreal Canadiens and Carolina Hurricanes for doing exactly that, and their results seem to speak for themselves.

This seems to be the only way to not just get ahead, but stay ahead in the modern NHL. The more successful the Canucks’ rebuild, the more under threat they become…unless they do something about it first.