Kotkaniemi offer sheet an example of NHL's culture of revenge
With their offer of a one-year deal at $6.1 million to an unproven young talent, the Carolina Hurricanes avenged a two-year-old offer sheet. And that qualifies as entertainment in today's NHL
There’s nothing in the NHL’s collective bargaining agreement that prevents retaliatory offer sheets. There’s also nothing in the league’s by-laws that keeps an owner from being petty and vengeful. And that’s why the Carolina Hurricanes’ one-year offer sheet of $6.1 million to Jesperi Kotkaniemi of the Montreal Canadiens for one season is all on the up-and-up.
Oh yes, the hockey world got some dog-days-of-August chuckles over the terms of the offer the Hurricanes’ made to Kotkaniemi, right down to the $20 signing bonus and the wording of the statement. Very entertaining if you like this kind of stuff. Forget that it makes the NHL look like a garage league. Check that, even more of a garage league.
Before you go off giving props to Tom Dundon - and make no mistake, the Hurricanes’ owner was the person behind this stunt – think for one minute whether there is any other self-respecting owner in the league who would respond to a two-year-old offer sheet with such pettiness. Would two-time Stanley Cup winner Jeff Vinik do something like that? Not likely. Would Bill Foley or Ted Leonsis or Craig Leipold stoop to such silliness? No way.
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But Mr. Dundon, who fancies himself a bit of a renegade – remember the Alliance of American Football? – doesn’t seem to care what people think about him, and he’s willing to go to any length to make his point. Canadiens GM Marc Bergevin offer-sheeted Hurricanes center Sebastian Aho two years ago to his current deal, a five-year contract with an $8.45 million annual cap hit. The contract was structured to give $38.6 million of the total $42.3 million salary in signing bonus, which was designed to put the squeeze on the Hurricanes and at least make them have to swallow hard before matching. It was a no-brainer that the Hurricanes were going to match the offer and it got a young star under contract for five years at what is actually looking like a more team-friendly cap number with every passing year. Aho is eighth in goals in the NHL since that deal kicked in and 15th in points. Among all the players in the 2015 draft, where the Hurricanes selected him 35th overall, only Connor McDavid, Mitch Marner and Jack Eichel have outscored him.
Say what you want about Bergevin, but what he did is what offer sheets are supposed to do. He just didn’t go far enough. As team friendly as the Aho contract is and will continue to be, it cost a budget franchise more than $22 million in real money in the first two seasons. That was done by Bergevin to put the Hurricanes in a spot where they’d have to at least consider allowing him to sign with the Canadiens. If you’re not going to put the team with the restricted free agent in a bind, there’s really no sense in doing the deal. The Canadiens used the CBA to try to sign a player who had no contractual obligation to his team at the time and were unsuccessful. In most places in the world, people accept things like that and move on with their lives.
But the way the Hurricanes handled all of this, right down to sending out Twitter messages in both English and French, you get the sense that Dundon has been stewing for two years, just waiting for an opportunity to strike back. Although he had no hockey background before purchasing the Hurricanes and has been their majority owner for only three-and-a-half years, Dundon has been a quick study in the culture of this game. And there is nothing that people love more in hockey, nothing that fuels them to watch, than a good old case of vengeance. It’s true on the ice and most definitely off it.
You see, in the NHL, every single slight that is ever suffered has to be addressed, has to be returned in kind, or often worse. It’s what led Brian Burke to challenge Kevin Lowe to a barn fight in the summer of 2007 when the Edmonton Oilers signed Dustin Penner to an offer sheet and it’s what led to one of the ugliest incidents in the history of hockey, the Todd Bertuzzi attack on Steve Moore in 2004. There’s something about this game - it’s at the NHL level and it filters down - that a player, a team, an owner, a fanbase, a mascot cannot be wronged in any way, shape or form without over-the-top retribution. It likely has a lot to do with the vigilante mentality that players and coaches have, knowing they are the ones who have to administer justice because the on-ice officials and league office have proven time and again they will not. It’s also a case of toxic masculinity at its finest.
So now, Dundon has his revenge. Nice work. You just paid $6.1 million for a 21-year-old who is more of an unknown than a known, a kid who scored five goals in the regular season in 2020-21 and registered a team-low 11:48 in ice time in Game 3 of the Stanley Cup final before being a healthy scratch for Games 4 and 5. So in the same summer they traded a Calder Trophy finalist in a deal nobody can figure out and lost a Norris Trophy-caliber defenseman because they didn’t want to pay him market value, the Hurricanes won the press conference. And, hoo-boy, did they stick it to the Habs.
So if the Canadiens decide to not match the offer, and there’s almost no logical reason for them to do so, the Hurricanes now have either a promising young player who will fit in with their group of young players and become the dynamic center the Canadiens envisioned when they drafted him third overall, one spot ahead of Brady Tkachuk in 2018 (and subsequently jerked around with a terrible development plan) or a $6.1 million anchor. We don’t know, they don’t know. Nobody does at this point. And it will have cost them a first- and third-round pick.
What we do know is that what Dundon did is right on brand with the culture of the NHL. Get the revenge first, then worry about the consequences.