- Leo Carlsson’s five-year offer sheet from the Flyers would make him the NHL’s highest-paid player
- The deal resets the RFA market Connor Bedard was waiting on this summer
- Read below for what it could mean for Bedard’s next Blackhawks contract
The Connor Bedard contract math just got a lot more expensive.
Leo Carlsson lit the restricted free agent market on fire Friday. The Flyers tendered the Ducks center a five-year offer sheet worth $18 million per season, a number that would make him the highest-paid player in the league. Anaheim has seven days to match.
Philadelphia made it official:
Bedard, Carlsson and Adam Fantilli were the three big RFAs everyone expected to set the bar for each other this summer, per the Chicago Sun-Times. Carlsson went first, and he went huge.
Ben Pope figured Bedard was tracking toward a cap hit somewhere between $13 million and $16 million on a max eight-year deal. An $18 million AAV on the Carlsson sheet changes that conversation.
That new benchmark should push Bedard’s asking price up by a million or two a year, in Pope’s view. Bedard could point right at Carlsson and ask for the same, if not more.
None of this means Bedard is going anywhere. He became eligible for an extension on July 1 and has said all along that he wants to stay in Chicago.
Pope laid out where things stood back in the spring:
Bedard talks with general manager Kyle Davidson often, and the two sides have kept the lines open. The question was never whether he re-signs. It was the price.
Davidson said on July 1 that a deal was not there yet. Carlsson just made the gap a little harder to close.
Bedard is coming off a career year. He put up 75 points on 30 goals and 45 assists in 69 games, his best season since Chicago took him first overall in 2023.
He is also nursing a shoulder issue after an awkward skate in Vancouver on Thursday, though the Blackhawks have not put a timeline on it.
Carlsson reset the top of the market. Now Davidson has to decide how close to it he wants to get for his franchise center.
