The Real Reason NHL Teams Rarely Use Offer Sheets Anymore

That's what a well-connected player agent suggested during a recent interview with journalist Jimmy Murphy of RG Media.

According to the agent, who requested anonymity, the reluctance doesn't come from general managers themselves, but rather from the owners, who reportedly view any attempt to submit a hostile offer to a player from another organization very negatively.

Offer sheets-contracts proposed by one team to a restricted free agent in the hopes of prying them away from their current club-are rare in the NHL. Yet they are fully legal under the collective bargaining agreement. Historically, very few have been submitted, and even fewer have been accepted.

The most famous example remains the offer made by the Carolina Hurricanes to Jesperi Kotkaniemi in 2021, a direct response to the one the Canadiens had made to Sebastian Aho two years earlier.

Since then, the climate between organizations seems to have cooled any desire to repeat such a move. The explanation offered by the agent confirms what many observers had already suspected: a collective will, led behind the scenes by the owners, to maintain an unofficial status quo.

This situation raises several questions about the competitiveness and fairness of the player market. While some teams struggle to retain their young talent due to salary cap constraints, others-despite having the necessary cap space-seem hesitant to act for fear of crossing an invisible line.

In a league where parity is often promoted as a central pillar, the absence of offer sheets may not simply reflect a sporting strategy, but also an internal culture that stifles bold moves in the name of owner solidarity.

It remains to be seen whether a team will dare to challenge this silent consensus-and whether the NHL will one day step in to more clearly regulate a mechanism that, though provided for in the collective agreement, now seems almost completely neutralized.