The Philadelphia Flyers have put the entire league on notice, signing the Anaheim Ducks’ Leo Carlsson to an epic five-year offer sheet. With an average annual value of $18 million, the deal will make the 21-year-old center the highest-paid player in hockey, creating a gargantuan decision for a Ducks team that’s still on the rise.
The $18 million question: Should the Ducks match the offer sheet or should they take the compensation, a whopping four first-round picks?
Let’s dig in, starting with the Flyers’ side of the equation.
Leo Carlsson finishes off the 2-on-1 chance
Why did the Flyers do this?
It’s not enough to say “Leo Carlsson is already really good and will only get better as he enters his prime.” From a Philadelphia-specific context, the question has more to do with timing. Is this team really one player away, no matter how good, to be giving up that kind of draft capital? The answer, honestly, is kind of.
The Flyers surprisingly made the playoffs last season on the back of a young, deep team. While some might expect a step back, there’s enough talent up and down the lineup to believe the team could stay competitive next season, especially as its young players continue to blossom.
The one thing missing: genuine star power, especially down the middle. The Flyers’ current best option, Trevor Zegras, profiles more as a 2C and mostly plays wing anyway. Carlsson has the potential to be truly great with the upside of being the kind of top-10 center that championship teams are often built around. Put him at the top of the depth chart, and Philadelphia’s forward group starts making a ton of sense.
Looking at things from a Cup Checklist perspective, it’s pretty easy to see Carlsson one day filling out that glaring red “need” at the very top. Even if he doesn’t currently, and there are still some top-end issues, Carlsson gives the Flyers a real shot at filling the team’s biggest hole.
That Carlsson, 21, is in a similar age cohort as Porter Martone (19) and Matvei Michkov (21) adds another layer to that. It gives the team a budding elite core up front that features players still outside of their prime.
Martone being so effective right out of the gate last season is the big X-factor here, as it helps move the Flyers up a tier going into next season. Carlsson only adds to that as a legit 1C where the Flyers would be the third-best team in the Metro on paper — with plenty of room to grow considering the upside of those three forwards.
Getting that kind of franchise centerpiece is very difficult to do outside of the draft, and the Flyers becoming a likely playoff team makes that avenue unlikely. With those types of players not traded often, an offer sheet was the best route.
Can Carlsson live up to this contract?
Here’s the crutch: In order to give this offer sheet a real shot, all contract efficiency has to go out the window. Just paying Carlsson his current worth would be an easy match for Anaheim, a team with $38 million in cap space. So too would any small overpay. For this to really work, it has to be a massive overpay, one big enough to give the Ducks real pause as to whether it’s actually worth it.
RFA deals are usually where teams build value, as they generally get paid 10 to 20 percent less than UFAs due to team control. Carlsson’s deal is obviously far from that. Even factoring for significant growth from both the salary cap and Carlsson himself, he just isn’t an $18 million player.
With Kirill Kaprizov making $17 million, Cale Makar soon to be asking for the same and the max contract sitting at 20 percent ($20.8 million), it’s easy to see how Carlsson is nowhere near worth $18 million. For now, he’s a solid 1C, but that kind of money requires MVP-level ability. We’re talking a top-five player in the world.
Even as the contract ages over five years, that level doesn’t fall enough for $18 million to make sense. To be worth it in Year 1, Carlsson’s Net Rating would have to be close to plus-25; by Year 5 it would still need to be around plus-17. He’s currently projected for less than half of the needed Year 1 value. While he gets close in Year 5, he’s still on the wrong side of the expected value line.
The ceiling case is there for Carlsson to be worth it near the end of the deal, and it gets more likely every year. He goes from a sub-10 percent shot in the first three years, to 20 and 28 percent in the final two. But that’s not anywhere likely enough to make this an efficient deal, especially when taking the whole deal at face value. Even if Carlsson approaches $18 million in Year 5, the likelihood that he adds $90 million of value over the entire five years is low. There’ll be a lot of pay equity to make up for over the first three to four years.
To Carlsson’s credit, he played relatively close to the level necessary for 25 games last year before getting injured. Perhaps it’s not so far-fetched to see him take that kind of leap early, and if Anaheim believes Carlsson can be that from day one of this deal or even Year 2, then maybe this is an easy match after all.
But there’s a big difference between a small sample leap and being a consistent MVP-level player. While Carlsson has real potential to be worth the price someday, the poison pill is the extreme unlikelihood that it will be too much (front-loaded) money all the way through; that it’ll be one of the league’s least efficient contracts.
The Flyers, a likely playoff team with $25 million in cap space and a fairly set lineup on good deals, can make that bet — especially because they can insulate him and provide Carlsson with ample help. For a Ducks team with a lot of holes, it’s a much trickier proposition.
Should the Ducks match the offer sheet?
There are a few ways to look at this, but the starting point is a combination of the two questions above: Is Carlsson worth $18 million, and is he worth more than the compensation coming back from the Flyers?
We have a good sense of the answer to the first question, and it’s “probably not.” It’s the second question that’s a lot more difficult to answer.
On paper, many hockey fans have been conditioned to believe that “four first-round picks” is a lot. But there’s a massive difference between four top-five picks and four late firsts, especially with the value of late firsts dropping over the last two decades. Figuring out where Philadelphia’s will land and how that relates to Carlsson’s worth is a key piece of the puzzle.
By my math, Carlsson’s value over the next five years comes out to about 16.7 wins — right in between the value of first and second overall and a shade higher than 10 picks at 31st overall.
There’s an equilibrium point between those two truths where it may be worth it to the Ducks not to match, but it’s unlikely the haul from this offer sheet hits that balance.
Based on a rough simulation of next season using current team ratings and last year’s schedule, Philadelphia’s 2027 first with Carlsson in the lineup averages out to roughly 19th to 20th overall. Four of those combined come out to 12.2 wins — 4.5 less than Carlsson alone. Given Philadelphia’s trajectory, it feels relatively safe to assume the next three firsts after that will be a little less valuable than the 2027 first, too.
Essentially, Carlsson is worth more than four firsts from Philadelphia. If it were a one-for-one trade, it’s an easy no. But the overpayment of roughly $25 million from an inflated AAV complicates things.
It’s a lot harder for the Ducks to build a proper team with that much money tied up in Carlsson. It lowers the ceiling of a team that’s honestly not that close to contending even with Carlsson in the lineup. That lack of surplus value needs to be factored into the equation, where it’ll be very difficult to build a winner with Carlsson taking up that much space. That’s especially true if the internal pay scale changes for Cutter Gauthier this summer and Beckett Sennecke next summer. If this deal means that trio makes $40 million to $45 million combined, Anaheim’s rebuild will basically be DOA.
It would certainly be painful to reset, but perhaps a little more prudent if everything is done right.
Eight firsts over the next four years is a lot of pick equity to do just that, even if Philadelphia’s firsts likely won’t be high. The Ducks starting again with their current base and a Thunder-like treasure chest of picks, aided further by being worse without Carlsson, could ultimately give the franchise an even higher ceiling than what they currently have with Carlsson.
Then again, the off-ice price of that may be way too difficult to stomach for a team that just ended a seven-year playoff drought in a non-traditional market. Carlsson is the current face of the franchise, and that often means a lot more than just the on-ice value he provides. He puts butts in seats. The ramifications of losing that kind of talent can set a franchise back, with fan base malaise leading to fewer ticket sales, which turns into more budgetary restrictions in a rising cap world.
The Ducks have some momentum right now, and it would be tough to squander that by losing their best player. But that also has to be balanced with the potential that this all leads to nothing because of how prohibitive Carlsson’s contract and the domino effect of it could become.
The contract inefficiency makes this a significantly more challenging choice than it would normally be; Leo Carlsson is not worth $18 million per year on a five-year deal.
But he’s also worth more than four “meh” firsts.
That’s the crux of the situation. The Ducks are in an unenviable position, faced with two unappetizing options. Either way, they’re swallowing poison with one option infecting the short term and one option infecting the long term.
It takes a nasty offer sheet to make keeping your franchise player feel like anything but a slam dunk, and the Flyers have delivered here. Now we wait to see which pill Anaheim takes — and how it affects the Ducks’ suddenly sour future.