Kings positioned to be an offer sheet target

Quietly, the Los Angeles Kings have been navigating a challenging off-season with regards to the salary cap.

Their current financial inflexibility opens the door for an aggressive counterparty interested in improving their team – and they can do so by leveraging those rarely used offer sheets. But not one of them. Two of them.

Offer sheets are few and far between in the National Hockey League for a variety of reasons. Restricted free agents (RFA) in most circumstances have much less negotiating leverage with their respective rightsholders. And even in circumstances where an RFA may be looking to move on, you tend to see direct trade talks pick up.

It’s why we continue to hear the rumour mill churning over Carolina’s Martin Necas – the Hurricanes are close to bumping their heads on the salary cap ceiling, and a Necas trade may offer the opportunity to fortify the lineup with cheaper external talent.

But Los Angeles is a unique circumstance. Even after letting several players head to the market during unrestricted free agency (notably defenceman Matt Roy and winger Viktor Arvidsson), the Kings have about $9 million in cap space available to them.

The problem is they have a trio of forwards still to sign: forwards Quinton Byfield and Arthur Kaliyev, and defenceman Jordan Spence. That’s two very promising young players, and one who seems to have already arrived in the form of Byfield, who will be looking for a big raise.

This is the sort of scenario where teams ask themselves which player(s) they may want to sign to a bridge deal, kicking the proverbial can down the road on a pricier long-term extension. Not only could the Kings engineer one or more bridge deals here, but they have enough space that, even if they do want to make bigger financial commitments now, freeing up a few millions of salary from the rest of the lineup wouldn’t be a hard chore.

If other teams let them.

Consider the below offer sheet table, which provides the compensatory ranges for the 2024-25 season, with specific focus on the highlighted middle range:

In most cases, offer sheets may not make sense. There are always opportunities to engineer a straight trade, and the compensatory ranges for top-end players in the offer sheer compensation program are downright absurd – four first-round picks coupled with an eight-figure contract to land a premium RFA defines prohibitive costs.

But if you can identify second-tier talent that may be undervalued in the market (or check the box of a likely late bloomer), you can tie multiple offer sheets together and challenge salary cap-distressed or cash-poor teams.

In this specific case, a team has three targets (Byfield, Kaliyev, Spence) and can tie two concurrent offer sheets together at a cost of $10.7-million – well in excess of Los Angeles’ remaining cap space, but moreover, forces the Kings into a real decision. (It goes without saying the players need to sign said offer sheet, too – the last two to do so were Sebastian Aho in Carolina, and Jesperi Kotkaniemi in Montreal.)

What’s promising about all three players is that each has a good argument they were positive impacts (in Byfield’s case, perhaps significantly positive) to Los Angeles’ on-ice results. The below table shows their performance from 2021-24, along with comparable players over that timeframe based on their production:

If you take a devil’s advocate approach for a moment, there are certainly things you can nitpick with each player.

Kaliyev may have promising on-ice results, but the individual goal scoring has yet to develop. Spence looks like the dream of a long-term top-four defenceman, but it was the Drew Doughty and Mikey Anderson pairing that typically drew the tough assignments. Byfield looks like a stud, but since he’s entered the league he’s been tied to the hip of Anze Kopitar and Adrian Kempe to an extraordinary degree – two extremely talented forwards capable of lifting the play of most skaters around the league.

Assuming you allay those concerns, what could a dual offer sheet package look like? That all depends on a team’s true target. For Los Angeles, it might be a dream scenario to land Byfield specifically at a $6.3-million contract with term matching a theoretical offer sheet, but accepting that fate means they cannot bridge the player — an unlikely scenario to begin with considering how productive Byfield has been early in his career. That’s how you open the door to a slightly smaller, concurrent offer sheet to Spence (or even Kaliyev). The Kings could match that too, but again, they’re now over the salary cap with at least one more material restricted free agent pending.

Offer sheets may be uncommon, but they exist within the NHL’s CBA for good reason, and for an aggressive team looking to round out the talent in advance of opening night, Los Angeles offers a promising opportunity.

Data via Natural Stat Trick, NHL.com, Evolving Hockey, Hockey Reference