And you thought August in the NHL was boring!

The St. Louis Blues did all of us involved with the league a solid on Tuesday when they not only made a trade in which they re-acquired their own 2025 second-round pick and a 2026 fifth from the Pittsburgh Penguins for a 2026 second and 2025 third, but then put that re-acquired second on the line when they signed Edmonton Oilers restricted free agents defenseman Philip Broberg and forward Dylan Holloway each to offer sheets.

Broberg signed for two years, $9,161,834 (a cap hit of $4,580,917) and Holloway for two years, $4,580,914 (a cap hit of $2,290,457). The exact amounts are for a reason. The Oilers have seven days to match the offers or let them go to the Blues. The very exact numbers are the max amounts yearly when it comes to compensation should the Oilers let them go. Broberg would net Edmonton a second-round pick in 2025 and Holloway a third-round pick.

These are the first offer sheets signed by a player since 2021 when the Carolina Hurricanes signed Montréal Canadiens forward Jesperi Kotkaniemi to one which the Canadiens opted to let him go and there's nothing spicier than an offer sheet in the NHL.

We'll dig into the myriad reasons why offer sheets are great for the NHL and why teams should be using them more often. After all, what's bad for one team can be a coup to greatness for another one.

We're positive you've got opinions about offer sheets and we want to hear them in our comment section, so let's hear it!

Offer Sheets Are Good for Business

There's a sort of helplessness for NHL players when they enter into restricted free agency.

Their rights still belong to the team, but they're technically able to negotiate deals with anyone who might want to acquire them.

Free agency is free agency, and players should be able to go and get paid by whoever wants to get a deal done and pay what the player wants. Players don't like being in limbo when it comes to contracts because they want to play hockey. Yes, they want to get paid their worth, too, but mostly they want to play when it's time.

In this case, the Oilers, a team in cap hell, was going to have to find a way to get the money to work (likely by making a trade or sweating it out until opening night when they can put Evander Kane on LTIR) but the Blues have cap space and needed desperately to add younger players to their roster. This was the means necessary to make that happen whether Oilers GM Stan Bowman likes it or not.

Players who go unsigned at the start of camp then get wrongly labeled as holdouts and suddenly they look like the bad guys because they didn't sign in time to get on the ice with teammates. Offer sheets take care of that possible issue.

Players don't want to upset the team they're with and the teams mostly don't want to upset the players, but they also want things done the way they'd like. Offer sheets upset that balance, but it gets the player signed.

Offer Sheets Create Drama

The inherent beauty of an offer sheet system is that it's tailor-made to create drama, especially in the NHL.

Offer sheets are taboo in the NHL and as silly as that is since it's a very legitimate way for general managers to acquire players, they create an instant buzz because it's one team jumping into another team's business in a way and how teams respond to them can be good.

Take the battle between the Montréal Canadiens and Carolina Hurricanes, for instance.

In July 2019, the Canadiens signed Hurricanes star restricted free agent Sebastian Aho to a five-year, $42.27 million offer sheet. This was done because the Habs wanted to land a great player, mostly, but also because they felt that amount and the way it was paid out. That contract had an $8.4 million cap hit and was laden with bonuses and heavy on actual salary paid out upfront.

Carolina matched the deal, and everything was all well and good for Aho and the Hurricanes moving forward, but the Hurricanes never forgot. Two years later, Carolina signed Canadiens RFA Jesperi Kotkaniemi to a one-year, $6.1 million offer sheet that also included a $20 signing bonus, 20 being the number Aho wears.

The Hurricanes made no bones about why they did it:

That Carolina gave up a first-round and third-round pick in 2022 to the Canadiens was a price worth paying to them to be able to meme fans in Montréal the rest of the offseason. Of course, Kotkaniemi hasn't quite turned into the player you would hope the No. 3 pick in the 2018 draft would, but at least Carolina got to pay back a grudge and that's what matters here.

Offer Sheets Make NHL General Managers Stay Sharp

Teams that sign restricted free agents to offer sheets aren't always doing it just to better their own team. After all, it's easy enough for a team to match an offer sheet when it's a player they value highly and even more likely when they've got the salary cap space to get it done.

But the real beauty of offer sheets comes from how a smart opposing GM uses them against a team that is forced to make difficult choices out of the blue because of how they've managed the roster.

The Blues' offer sheets to Philip Broberg and Dylan Holloway are a great example. According to PuckPedia, the Oilers are $354,167 over the cap already and if they match the offers to Broberg and Holloway, they would be more than $7.2 million over it.

Yes, teams can go over the cap by 10 percent in the offseason, but moving out that much money, even with Evander Kane likely opening the season on long-term injured reserve, would still put them in a hole big enough where they'd need to move out an important player.

Edmonton spent this summer loading up their offense re-signing Adam Henrique (two years, $6 million), Corey Perry (one year, $1.25 million) and Conor Brown (one year, $1 million) while also adding Jeff Skinner (one year, $3 million) and Viktor Arvidsson (two years, $8 million). The individual money isn't a lot, but it adds up and comes with risks.

It's easy to manage things in a way where the prevailing thought is, "Nah, offer sheets won't happen to us," because they so rarely happen, but Edmonton was the perfect team to be put into this position and St. Louis pounced on it.

Offer Sheets Create Enemies

We're big fans of the spitefulness with which the Carolina Hurricanes offer sheet to Jesperi Kotkaniemi was used because that's cheeky and fun, but how offer sheets get used can genuinely cause rancor between teams and general managers. Well...at least a couple of GMs anyhow.

Back in 2007, then Edmonton Oilers GM Kevin Lowe signed Anaheim Ducks restricted free agent forward Dustin Penner to a five-year, $21.5 million offer sheet. The Ducks didn't match the offer and took a first-, second-, and third-round pick in the 2008 draft from the Oilers as compensation.

The move incensed then Ducks GM Brian Burke so much that he wanted to rent a barn in Lake Placid, NY and challenge Lowe to a fight. The fight, fortunately (unfortunately?) never happened and cooler heads prevailed over time while Burke and Lowe made peace. Throughout Burke's history of being a GM, he never used offer sheets to add a player so having one turned against him was taken personally.

It's a fun anecdote but it distills down why GMs can't stand offer sheets. Burke's principles allowed him to not have a spiteful get-back against the Oilers like Hurricanes GM Don Waddell did with the Canadiens, but it's that entire sense of staying out of another team's business that surrounds RFAs and offer sheets. And if a team interrupts what another team is (or isn't) trying to do with their RFAs, feelings get hurt and memories get longer.

Offer Sheets Are How Things Are Supposed Work in the NHL

Whether an offer sheet is done in an honest-to-goodness way to improve a team or in a predatorial kind of way to take advantage of another team being in a difficult spot doesn't matter. Offer sheets get stuff done and if GMs choose to not use them, hey, that's their prerogative but they're not maximizing their ability to make their team better.

When the Philadelphia Flyers signed defenseman Shea Weber to a 14-year, $110 million offer sheet in 2012 (which is eye-popping regardless) they did so because they thought the Nashville Predators wouldn't have enough money to pay out their No. 1 defenseman. That contract had a $13 million signing bonus due every July 1 for the first four years of the deal and then an $8 million bonus in the next two seasons. Nashville matched it and Weber's contract officially comes to an end in 2026 while on the Utah Hockey Club's payroll.

The Calgary Flames did something similar in 2013 with Ryan O'Reilly and the two-year, $10 million offer sheet they signed him to which the Colorado Avalanche matched before the day was out. Both former GMs Jay Feaster of Calgary and Greg Sherman of Colorado, however, said it was just a part of doing business... the way it's intended to work in the NHL.

Sore feelings don't make teams get better, but being proactive about improvement does, and signing RFAs to offer sheets when it's the right move makes sense. It works with minimal drama in the NBA and NFL. The NHL can benefit from it both on the ice and off of it where we're always starved for stories to analyze.