The Leo Carlsson offer sheet didn’t just shake up Anaheim and Philadelphia. It also landed squarely in Chicago, where Connor Bedard’s next contract suddenly looks a little more expensive.
On Friday afternoon, Flyers general manager Daniel Briere handed Carlsson a five-year offer sheet worth $90 million. If Anaheim doesn’t match over the next seven days, the 21-year-old could wind up in Philadelphia as the new number-one center in the City of Brotherly Love. The deal would make him the NHL’s highest-paid player on an annual basis, with an $18 million average annual value.
That’s a massive number on its own, but the ripple effects are what matter here. Anaheim would have to weigh the possibility of losing four first-round picks, while also trying to sort out other business, including new contracts for rising talent like Cutter Gauthier and a defense group that still needs help. Philadelphia, meanwhile, would be betting that Carlsson is worth the cost and enough to push them into real contention in the East.
For the Blackhawks, though, the real issue is Bedard.
Bedard and Carlsson have been on a collision course for comparison since the 2023 NHL Draft, when they went first and second overall. They’re both franchise centers, both the face of their teams, and both headed toward second contracts that were always going to be measured against each other.
The numbers tell part of the story. Bedard has 75 goals and 203 points in 219 games.
Carlsson has 61 goals and 141 points in 201 career games. Bedard has also carried the heavier load as the face of an Original Six franchise, and he’s done it with far less offensive support than Carlsson has in Anaheim, where Gauthier, Beckett Sennecke, and Troy Terry all play key roles.
On production alone, Bedard has every reason to believe he should land above Carlsson. Nobody in Chicago can really argue otherwise.
The question is how far above.
There’s no sign this turns into a standoff. Everything coming out of Bedard’s camp and the Blackhawks suggests he wants to stay in Chicago and believes in what the team is building.
He looks comfortable in the Windy City and appears ready to eventually wear the captain’s “C” and lead the franchise back toward contention. Even so, Carlsson’s $18 million AAV probably nudges Bedard’s price up by a million or two a year.
For now, that’s not a crisis. Chicago has more than $29 million in cap room, and Bedard is the only major contract left to sort out this summer.
The real concern is what happens after that. As the Blackhawks’ top player, his deal will shape the market for the rest of the core.
If Bedard gets a little more, the next wave of negotiations gets a little more expensive too.
That matters when the time comes for Anton Frondell, Artyom Levshunov, Sam Rinzel, and others to get paid. Ideally, those deals arrive when Chicago is moving into its contention window and every dollar starts to matter the way it does for teams like Colorado, Dallas, and Minnesota.
A couple extra million now might feel harmless. A few years from now, it can change the math.
There’s also a more uncomfortable possibility. If Carlsson’s offer sheet encourages another team to take a swing at Bedard, Chicago could be forced into a much bigger problem. A five-year deal at $20 million per season would be hard for any player to ignore, especially with the chance to reach unrestricted free agency at 26 and cash in for $100 million.
That outcome still feels unlikely. But the Carlsson deal has raised the stakes, and it has put more pressure on Kyle Davidson to lock up his star sooner rather than later. In a salary-cap world that keeps getting louder, waiting can get expensive fast.
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