Montreal Canadiens: Kotkaniemi Offersheet Puts Habs Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Montreal Canadiens GM Marc Bergevin’s passivity with Kotkaniemi’s contract has forced him to make a tough decision with seemingly no good choice, still, both options are intriguing.

Jesperi Kotkaniemi is a good player in the here and now. He also has a tremendously bright future if his development goes well. He is also never going to live up to the $6.1 million he is bound to earn this season. These facts are not mutually exclusive and they are what makes this decision such a difficult one to make.

Kotkaniemi has become an increasingly divisive player in the last year. Some point to his playoff goalscoring and call him a clutch player who is about to explode into a legitimate top-6 centreman. Those same people, fairly, point toward the ridiculous rotation of wingers Kotkaniemi had last season, which gave him no chance to develop chemistry with anyone or settle into his play. He was also scratched during the biggest games of the season when he probably shouldn’t have been.

On the flip side, Kotkaniemi’s analytical darling label from his rookie season has disappeared in the two seasons since.

As JFresh’s tweet also states, Kotkaniemi’s playoff performance is unsustainable. His 23% shooting percentage dwarfs his regular-season average, which has a far larger sample, of 8%, so he’s shooting an insane 15% higher in the postseason than the regular season. While some players do just up their game when it matters most, tripling your shooting percentage screams unsustainable.

What needs to be stated is that despite Kotkaniemi’s struggles, he only recently turned 21. He is younger than a whole bunch of Habs prospects this fanbase, and myself, are hugely excited for, including Mattias Norlinder, Jesse Ylonen, Ryan Poehling, Cayden Primeau, etc. And he has three years of NHL experience, in which he very rarely looked out of place. And this season was going to be the one in which he had a real chance of establishing himself as a top-6 player.

Kotkaniemi is clearly a very valuable asset for this team and if he had been traded straight up for a first and third-round pick, both for the 2022 draft and belonging to a likely playoff contender, most of the fanbase would have been in an uproar. But the offersheet complicates this trade; it is no longer losing Kotkaniemi for those two assets, it would be keeping Kotkaniemi on an inflated contract or losing Kotkaniemi on an inflated contract in return for two picks in a good draft.

If the Canadiens match this contract, they would be fine from a salary cap perspective as long as Paul Byron remains on the LTIR, and Weber is obviously on it for the foreseeable future. In preparation for Byron’s return, however, the Habs would need to shed around $500,000 per CapFriendly and $1.5 million if they’d want some roster flexibility. So it would certainly be doable this season.

Problems arise in the medium term, however. This offersheet basically ensures that Kotkaniemi will make $6.1 million next season as well, since a qualifying offer would put this year’s salary as the baseline, so whoever keeps Kotkaniemi in this ordeal will likely need to way overpay him for quite a while. But if one looks at this overpayment as an investment to keep a promising young player, it might be worthwhile.

If Bergevin doesn’t match the offersheet, however, some interesting things will happen. Firstly, the Habs regain cap flexibility and add two draft picks in a strong draft. The Hurricanes are not playoff locks, especially since they have lost Alex Nedeljkovic and Dougie Hamilton, and adding a potential lottery pick in a draft that not only has potential franchise players available in Matthew Savoie, Brad Lambert and especially Shane Wright but also has impressive talent available in the mid-first round slots is a tantalizing prospect.

At the same time, this is a huge risk from the Hurricanes’ perspective in what seems to be, at its core, a big petty middle finger in retaliation for the 2019 Aho offersheet. The Hurricanes may really like Kotkaniei, but he just isn’t what they need. In terms of natural centres vying for a spot on their lineup, they already have the aforementioned Sebastian Aho, Vincent Trocheck, Jordan Staal and Ryan Suzuki.

Sure, you can play Ryan Suzuki on the wing, but Jordan Staal would make for a very pricey fourth-line centre if you give Kotkaniemi the 3rd line centre spot. It’s just odd that the Hurricanes didn’t use this money on established star defenseman Dougie Hamilton when they still had him.

The Habs could of course match the offer and work on an 8-year deal for Kotkaniemi to sign in the next year, which would have always come in at a figure above $6 million. But Marc Bergevin could pull out the Uno reverse card to the Hurricanes Uno reverse card and not match the offer, leaving them in the tricky situation of paying four centremen over $4.75 million a year and just taking the compensation and hope that the Canes miss the playoffs.

Either way, this debacle has been hugely entertaining and I wish general managers submitted offer sheets more regularly, they’re extremely fun. While this is kind of a no-win situation for Bergevin, it can also be viewed as a no-lose situation, where both outcomes are risky and bank on young players reaching their potentials, it’s just that two of the young players implicated in this situation are question marks. The next week is bound to be fascinating for both the Habs and the Canes alike.