r/nhl

Title says it all, which current or past NHLer has a similar skill set and accomplishments of Haaland?

Hi all,

As free agency season has started, I wanted to get a handle on what the rules are for UFAs and RFAs, which is something I've never really paid attention to (maybe the minutiae bored me or something lol). Anyway, here's how I understand it:

- An unrestricted free agent (UFA) is a player whose contract with an NHL team has expired and they are eligible to sign a contract with any other team in the league, or even with a team in another league (e.g., one of the European leagues). In general, to be a UFA, a player has to be either 27 years old or have 7 years of active service in the NHL under their belt (whichever comes first) when the contract with their team expires.

- A restricted free agent (RFA) is a player whose contract with an NHL team has expired, but they are not yet 27 years old, nor do they yet have 7 years of active service in the NHL, so they cannot be a UFA. They can sign a contract with another team, but the process is a bit different:

1. When an RFA’s contract with an NHL team expires, that team has a certain amount of time to give the player a qualifying offer. This is a one-year contract that meets minimum NHL salary guidelines according to the current collective bargaining agreement (CBA). The player can either accept the qualifying offer (in which case it becomes their contract for the following season), or reject it and keep negotiating, not only with the team with whom their contract just expired, but also with other teams.

The qualifying offer's importance is not so much the years and dollar amount, but it's a legal mechanism by which the club says "we retain this player's rights". If they do not extend a qualifying offer to the RFA within the specified timeline, the player becomes a UFA, regardless of their age or years of service in the NHL.

2. If another NHL team is interested in the player's services, they can give the player an offer sheet - a document which lays out what they are willing to offer should the player sign with them. The RFA can sign the offer sheet presented by this other team, but the team that has the player's rights (i.e., the team with whom their contract has just expired, provided they first extended the player a qualifying offer) has the opportunity to match the offer sheet's terms.

If they choose to match, the player remains with the club that has their rights, under the terms of the other club's offer sheet. The other team gets nothing. If, on the other hand, they choose NOT to match, the player is free to sign a contract with the other team. However, that other team must compensate the team having the player's rights by surrendering several draft picks. The more expensive the contract, the higher the value of the draft picks the other team must surrender.

3. If the RFA and the team having his rights cannot agree to contract terms, they can both proceed to salary arbitration. This is a hearing before an arbitrator, where the player's agent argues that the player should receive a certain amount, while the team presents its argument for the amount it believes the player should receive, and the arbitrator looks at the evidence (the player's statistics, comparable contracts, etc.) and rules either in favour of the player or the team. The player is then obligated to accept that amount, or the team is obligated to pay that amount to the player, depending on what happens.

Do I have this right? Is there any nuance or anything I'm missing? Please let me know if my understanding of the process is correct.

Thanks!

- For me I feel like he is a good defensive center
- Could be the 3rd or 4th best player
- Feel like he can put up between 50-60 points in the future

I have never been so disappointed in an off season as I have been now. Like what the actual is Verkbeek doing? You publicly announce that you'll match any offer to Leo, you get rid of Veil and before people jump down my throat that 4th line was a huge reason why we won that first round. You trade MacT after one bad year, now Minty is gettin offer sheeted too. Like what are we doing? You pull Leo aside in private and tell him we match anything. You pull Minty aside and tell him the same thing. Like holy ****ing fumble in head office this year. We are a proven playoff team this year and what we are going back to rebuild for another 10 years? Awesome.

My pick goes to Ryan McDonagh. Granted, he's aging and is entering the final 3-4 years of his career, but, for most if not all of his career he's been mad underrated.

The NYR traded him in 2018, they never replaced him. And I say this as a NYR fan. That McDonagh+Miller trade to TB is in the bottom 10 worst trades I've ever seen. Not quite Forsberg/Erat bad but it's horrendous.

Tampa won 2 Cups and went to 3 straight finals with him, they basically gave him away to NSH in a cap dump move and immediately regressed defensively, while NSH improved.

And two years later, when NSH traded McDonagh back to TB they immediately regressed on the defense side of things while TB immediately improved.

As a NYR fan I desperately wanted the team to bring him back in 2024. Trouba had been a disaster for us in these playoffs and we needed someone like McDonagh so bad.

So McDonagh is my pick.

Who do you guys pick?

I know this is a bold take but hear me out:

First, I will give him his flowers:
-Brassard for Zibanejad was an S tier trade
-the Rick Nash trade was excellent, it gave us Ryan Spooner who turned into Ryan Strome, Ryan Lindgren and a pick which we flipped to draft K'Andre Miller.
-acquiring Fox and Panarin, tho I give him little credit for that as the two only wanted to play in NYR.

Now, the bad stuff. This will take a while.

• the Brendan Smith contract was atrocious from the get go. Smith was ideally a number 5 defensman and in the 2017 cap reality he gave him over 4M per year for 4 years??
• I just mentioned it in another post but that JT Miller/Ryan McDonagh trade is one of the worst trades I have ever seen. Period. Miller was then in his mid 20s and McDonagh was in his late 20s. Such a package should've given us a package which started with Cirelli. Again, "started with", meaning Cirelli++, like Cirelli, a 1st, a 2nd and a 3rd, easily.
• that Pionk plus 1st for Trouba trade sucked from the moment it was made. Pionk is a year younger than Trouba, why was there the need to add a first round pick??? And then to add insult to injury, that 8X8 Trouba contract in the 2019 cap reality was atrocious, easily a 1,5M overpay. A better contract would've been 6,5X6.
• extending Kreider to that contract was a big mistake too. 6,5M over 7 years for a power forward in his late 20s was a mistake. Apart from his 21-22, 22-23 and 23-24 seasons, Kreider has always been and will always be a streaky player. In 19-20, before the trade deadline, Kreider was in one of his hot streaks and he should've been moved for futures. By 24-25 everyone saw the decline and yes he started hot in 25-26 in ANA but got cold and his back 2/3rds of the season was decent at best.
• didn't leave the team with a long term, young 1C. By the time we made the playoffs, in 21-22, Zibanejad was already 28.
• those 2017 and 18 drafts were a disaster. 5 firsts only one of them really panned out (K'Andre Miller). Andersson and Kravstov were complete busts (at least the 2nd we got from LAK for Andersson turned into Cuylle), Chytil has just had the worst injury luck I've ever seen maybe besides DiPietro and Lundkvist, while a regular NHLer, is still a disappointment. Sandin was picked right after and was always seen as the superior prospect. Andersson was a reach when he was picked IIRC. Others like Necas, Suzuki(would've been the young 1C I was just talking about), Vilardi or Tippett were available.
• why trade a 2nd to dump Staal in 2020 if you're not going to do anything with the cap space?? We had 1-2 years before young guys like Kakko, Chytil, Fox, Lindgren, Shesterkin, Miller and more were going to command huge pay raises, guys like Borowiecki, Perry, Granlund, just to name a few, would've been fits for us in 2020. So trading that 2nd was useless if you're not going to do anything with the extra cap space

So I'm sorry, and I know this is unpopular, but I don't see why Gorton is so often praised so highly by people. Extremely underwhelming tenure as Rangers GM IMO. Maybe he's better as President of Hockey Ops...

Oh and btw, this doesn't mean I am a Drury fanboy. The Buchnevich trade, Goodrow contract, Panarin trade, just to name those, are complete disasters.