Innuendo loves a vacuum.
And in considering the status of Elias Pettersson extension talks, or a lack thereof, a vacuum is what we currently have to work with.
Back in the summer, Pettersson informed the public in an interview with Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman that he wanted to wait until after this season to discuss an extension with the Vancouver Canucks.
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The Canucks’ All-Star centre, a pending restricted free agent, has since declined to elaborate on the matter publicly, although the team has provided occasional updates.
Most recently, in an interview with Sportsnet’s Iain MacIntyre, Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin admitted it is a bit unusual not to be engaged with a core player on extension talks at this stage. The Canucks executive also expressed optimism about how the situation would resolve itself going forward.
“I have conversations (with his agent) but nothing obviously has changed,” Allvin told MacIntyre. “We want to keep Petey here. He knows that. At some point it’s going to come down to negotiations and if it’s working or not. We have another year with him as an RFA; we’re not going to lose him this summer. But that being said, I’m trying to plan for our team this year and next year and I want him to be a big part of it.”
Now obviously it’s just about impossible to halt a subtle but steady trickle of speculation and mounting fan anxiety in the face of an absence of information. Pettersson is a private person, and I don’t know his personal thoughts or feelings about negotiating an extension in-season or otherwise. Neither, it seems, does anyone else.
Which is Pettersson’s prerogative. His business, literally and figuratively.
The Canucks’ lack of clarity and ours, in the meantime, isn’t cause for undue consternation in and of itself.
Given some recent uptick in handwringing among Canucks fans about a crucial, potential agreement that doesn’t appear to be in an active negotiating stage at this juncture, I figured it might be worth attempting to demystify the actual process should this season play out without Pettersson and the Canucks coming to terms on an extension.
Maybe this is a fruitless exercise, but perhaps an understanding of exactly what this could look like can help us calm the waters in the meantime.
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Fair warning: As we proceed we’re going to dive deep into collective bargaining agreement minutiae here, so bear with me as we start with the basics.
We’ll begin with the fact that Pettersson is currently playing out the final season of a three-year “bridge” deal he signed in the fall of 2021. As that deal has approached expiration, Pettersson first became eligible to sign an extension with the Canucks this summer, on July 1, 2023, when his contract had one year remaining on it.
The superstar centre will be a restricted free agent with arbitration rights when his deal expires on July 1, 2024. Because his current contract is heavily backloaded and carries a cap hit of $7.35 million, he’ll require a qualifying offer (QO) equivalent to a one-year, $8.82 million contract offer in late June (usually June 30). Should an extension not be agreed to and formalized well ahead of time, that qualifying offer must be tendered by the Canucks at the appropriate time to preserve their right of first refusal and maintain Pettersson’s status as a restricted free agent.
NHL players who find themselves in this situation can simply accept their qualifying offer, which in Pettersson’s case, would lock him into a one-year deal worth $8.82 million. By accepting his qualifying offer, Pettersson would be leaving a fair bit of compensation on the table for the 2024-25 campaign, but he’d also significantly enhance his leverage going into his age-26 season as a superstar pending unrestricted free agent.
Contemporary NHL history indicates it would be surprising for a player of Pettersson’s stature to accept their QO.
Before we go further into the specific process and mechanisms that could govern Pettersson’s restricted free agency, Vancouver will obviously continue to try to get Pettersson’s autograph on a new contract before we reach even this stage. Perhaps the two sides re-engage ahead of the trade deadline or perhaps this waits until after the season, as Pettersson said was his preference this past summer.
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In any event, the cleanest and simplest outcome is that the two sides will reach an agreement before the late-June qualifying offer deadline. If they don’t, there’s nothing dramatic or contentious about tendering a qualifying offer to a star player. It’s standard practice, and most NHL teams tender anywhere from a few to a half dozen qualifying offers to various young players every offseason.
Once Pettersson is qualified and the market opens on July 1, he’d become a free agent, free to negotiate and discuss contractual options with the NHL’s 31 other clubs.
If an agreement is reached and an offer sheet tendered, however, the Canucks would have the opportunity to match any hypothetical deal — or, if the Canucks were to opt against matching an offer sheet, Vancouver would be entitled to compensation tethered to the annual average value of Pettersson’s agreement with a rival organization. Given Pettersson’s quality as a player, one can rest assured that the compensation would be equivalent to four first-round picks.
This is what Allvin is referring to when he notes to MacIntyre that the Canucks are still in control of the situation going into this summer.
It should be noted here that offer sheets are extremely unusual in the contemporary NHL. It’s rare we ever see one. It’s even rarer we see one involving a star player of Pettersson’s calibre.
Thirty years ago you’d occasionally see a star centre like Joe Sakic or Sergei Fedorov sign an offer sheet, but even those were routinely matched. In the nearly 20 years of the NHL’s salary-cap era, the only players who have switched teams by way of an offer sheet are Dustin Penner and Jesperi Kotkaniemi. It’s effectively a once-in-a-decade event, usually involving a young, middle-six calibre player and not a top-of-the-lineup marquee player.
Recent history suggests the chances are near zero that Pettersson’s situation will play out in this manner. And given that Canucks management has publicly indicated they’re willing to consider whatever shape of agreement — short-term, medium-term, long-term — that Pettersson would be most comfortable with, an offer sheet isn’t even necessarily a worst-case scenario outcome from a Canucks perspective in the highly improbable event that it occurs. The Canucks would most likely match the offer sheet and their star centre would be locked up, albeit at a premium price.
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Almost the only scenario in which an offer sheet would be truly inconvenient for the Canucks is if it were a one-year offer sheet. If a player signs an offer sheet and it is matched by their current team, the team is prohibited from trading that player for 12 months.
Effectively, for a player just one year removed from unrestricted free agency as Pettersson will be this offseason, a one-year offer sheet would serve to walk that player to unrestricted free agency and handcuff their current team from netting any return for that player before they hit the open market.
Once again, this is only the most remote possibility. It’s not one we’d expect the path of extension talks between Pettersson and the Canucks to trace.
Even within this scenario, it should be noted that there are devices teams can use to protect themselves. Were the Canucks to find themselves without an agreement with Pettersson in early July, for example, they could elect to take him to arbitration on July 6 (provided he didn’t first elect arbitration himself on July 5). Once a team has elected to file for arbitration with a player in the second window, that player is no longer eligible to receive an offer sheet.
If this exercise feels a bit uncomfortable, that’s because it is. NHL hockey is a high-stakes business, and in some instances, it can be a contact sport in the boardroom that matches what we see on the ice.
Which is why when Canucks management notes it has another year with Pettersson as a restricted free agent, we should take it with a generous helping of salt.
Because while it’s technically true, there’s downside and discomfort to going through the restricted free-agent process, even if it offers a variety of robust protections to NHL teams. There are also some slight but material risks in the process which are generally unwelcome, especially in managing a club’s relationship with a franchise calibre player.
When you consider the whole, it becomes crystal clear why the Canucks want to have an agreement sown up with Pettersson well before they have to seriously consider items like qualifying offers or arbitration or weighing the risk of an offer sheet.
Nonetheless, time isn’t of the essence just yet. Yes, the situation becomes more dicey if an agreement on Pettersson’s third contract isn’t done in the next five to six months, but that’s a ways away yet and even then, as we’ve covered, Canucks management will have a multitude of levers to pull to protect their interests if things do go long in negotiations.
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Having gone through the details, there are a few meaningful takeaways worth unpacking.
The first is that whatever one thinks of where the Canucks and Pettersson stand currently, it hasn’t impacted this team from performing at the highest level we’ve witnessed in this market in a decade.
Despite the occasional gurgling of rumour from national media and plugged-in podcast hosts, Pettersson’s contract status hasn’t become a circus locally. The Canucks star isn’t asked about his contract daily. And he’s performed at such a consistently high level all season that there’s been no talk whatsoever of this being a “distraction.”
Meanwhile, there’s been real value to Pettersson in waiting.
By going into the season without first hammering out a commitment with the team, the Canucks star has been able to glean a ton of information about where this team is and where it’s going. He’s had an opportunity to evaluate a new coach, take the temperature on the overall trajectory of the organization and watch his team make a meteoric, and somewhat unlikely, rise from the playoff bubble to the top of the Pacific Division.
Pettersson wants to win, first and foremost. It’s easy to imagine he feels far more optimistic about the chances of that happening in Vancouver today than he reasonably might’ve four or five months ago.
Finally, Pettersson has also enhanced his leverage, both due to his individual performance and the fundamental economics of the game. And that leverage could be strengthened further if the NHL’s hockey-related revenues continue to grow as projected this season and next, pushing the salary cap upper limit to $90 million (or higher) with Pettersson approaching unrestricted free agency as a 26-year-old.
Sometimes it’s helpful to examine the shape of things thoroughly and be thoughtful about their dynamics. When it comes to the posture of the Canucks and Pettersson, if we’re thoughtful about where things appear to stand, it becomes apparent that Pettersson’s own interests are probably best served by waiting, while the Canucks’ interests would be best served by certainty — particularly because Vancouver’s overall risk profile becomes more complex the closer we get to mid-June and July.
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That Canucks management seems to be keen, and perhaps even a touch impatient, to get to work on striking an agreement with Pettersson as soon as possible while the player seems intent on waiting in the manner he suggested he would before the outset of the campaign shouldn’t be a huge surprise given that dynamic.
It’s not a worrying set of circumstances at this point. In fact, based on the limited information we have to work with, this holding pattern is in line with what we’d expect based on the rational self-interest of both parties.
(Top photo: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
