Back in the summer of 2016, the Florida Panthers were weighing an offer sheet for Tampa Bay Lightning star Nikita Kucherov - and former Panthers assistant general manager Steve Werier says the work went far beyond the contract details.
Speaking on the process, Werier said the first priority was making sure Florida’s own roster was protected before anything became public. “Yeah.
There’s a lot of work. Like, you really want to make sure you keep your side of the street clean too, right?
Like, and when I say that, I mean when we were looking at doing an offer sheet in the summer of 2016, what I made sure we did leading up to that summer is, we locked up all of our core players who might be targeted, even though offer sheets weren’t too common back then.”
Werier pointed to Aleksander Barkov, Aaron Ekblad, Jonathan Huberdeau, Vincent Trocheck and Reilly Smith as players Florida signed before that summer. The reason was simple: once a team shows its hand, the rest of the league can respond in kind.
“And there’s a reason we signed all those guys before that summer when we were thinking about offer sheeting Kucherov, because you know, once the cat’s out of the bag, and especially once you’re the team launching that offer sheet. It’s a copycat will league.
Teams will come after you, and we weren’t prepared to lose one of those players, especially if that offer sheet got matched and someone retaliated. And you know that’s still pretty common plays.”
Werier also pointed to the Carolina Hurricanes as an example of how teams try to stay aggressive without leaving themselves exposed. He said Carolina has looked at offer sheets, but has also made sure its own players are secured.
“Like Anaheim, you know has some vulnerability coming up too. But you look at a team like Carolina.
Carolina’s been super aggressive in the last two years, right? They went after (Evan) Bouchard.
They basically got K’Andre Miller under threat of an offer sheet in New York, and then they structured a deal.
But it’s no coincidence Carolina’s been super proactive in locking up, you know, the (Logan) Stankoven’s, the Jackson Blake’s, even the Brandon Bussi’s, to make sure that, as aggressive as they are, they aren’t sort of vulnerable to retaliation easily.”
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