The old-school free agency scramble might be fading fast, at least if Ryan Mead and Greg Kaplan are reading the tea leaves correctly.
On this week’s Blueshirts Breakaway, the two hosts made the case that NHL free agency is no longer the destination for the game’s biggest names. Instead, they see a growing league-wide shift toward stars steering themselves out of the open market and into preferred spots through trades and extensions.
Mead pointed to the next wave of superstar decisions as the clearest test of that idea. "I don't think Auston Matthews and Connor McDavid are getting [to free agency]," Mead said while looking ahead to the next wave of superstar contracts. "I think they're going to get traded somewhere and will extend before [getting to market]."
He also brought Artemi Panarin into the conversation. Panarin, 34, recently signed a two-year deal with the Kings, and Mead still expects him to draw attention when Matthews and McDavid are up for their next contracts.
Kaplan framed Panarin as the kind of case that shows where this is headed. "Panarin is a perfect example from this year," Kaplan added. "He was a pending UFA and no team wanted to trade for him unless he was willing to sign an extension, so he went to the team that was willing to give him one."
The sample is still small, and this has really only started to show up over the last 18 months or so. Even so, the pattern is getting harder to miss: the league’s top players seem more likely to pick their landing spots before they ever hit the market, with sign-and-trade setups slowly crowding out the traditional free agency chase.
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