From shopping lists to auctioneer agents: Inside the NHL Free Agent Frenzy

Whenever the topic of free agency comes up, we are conditioned to think of the big names that might change the landscape of the league by changing jerseys. We search for Frank Seravalli’s Top 50 list or scroll Twitter to find out the latest on Johnny Gaudreau and Evgeni Malkin. But what about the other 595 players that will become free agents on July 13?

That’s not a typo. According to Puckpedia, at the time of writing, 326 players were scheduled to become unrestricted free agents and 271 players were scheduled to become restricted free agents when the 2021-22 season officially comes to a close at midnight on July 12. That didn’t even include the players that became UFAs Monday by virtue of their teams declining to tender qualifying offers.

When you consider that each team is entitled to sign a maximum of 50 players to NHL contracts, and most teams stay at 45-46 contracts, there are approximately 1,440 players under NHL contracts at any one time. So that means at least 40 percent of NHL-contracted players will have some form of free agent status as the page turns on the season.

It’s no wonder they call it a frenzy.

There will be an onslaught of deals signed in the coming days, but the process starts long before the official opening of free agency on the 13^th. From the time each team’s season wraps (and maybe even earlier), building a free agent plan is near the top of the agenda.

The first part of the plan focuses on a team’s RFAs. These are the players whose rights teams control. They aren’t going anywhere unless the club want to move on from them. While many in the front office will have been focused solely on the Draft in the weeks following the season, you can bet the person responsible for contracts within an organization has been keeping more than one eye on the deadlines for qualifying offers and buyouts to ensure there are no hiccups with the club’s RFAs. Sometimes, you can knock RFA deals off your to-do list quickly, but in cases where the player is eligible for a two-way qualifying offer or where his salary isn’t expected to exceed the qualifying offer number, a team will often simply tender the QO and push the negotiation to later in the summer when its bigger fish have been dealt with.

For RFAs due a big raise, teams are well advised to jump on those negotiations early. Figuring out the cap space allotted to your star RFAs will help you determine what you have left for UFA signings. Unfortunately, that is sometimes easier said than done. While in Vancouver’s front office, I tried to commence the discussions with RFAs Elias Pettersson and Quinn Hughes’ representatives in approximately March. For a variety of reasons, but mostly because their agency knew waiting would tend to favor the players, the process was a slog and we didn’t get deals done until September. Best laid plans!

The UFA process starts with identifying targets that fit your team needs. Not unlike what the amateur scouts do in building a Draft list, a team’s pro scouts will work on a list of priority targets. Actually, it’s more like several lists. They might make one list of guys who would fill the second line left winger slot on the team’s NHL roster, another list of the best NHL-AHL call-up forwards available, a third which identifies the top available power play quarterbacks for the AHL team, a list of the best available tough guys, and so on. The scouts develop those lists based on player type and fit alone, and then it’s up to the rest of the front office to evaluate whether the identified pieces can work from a potential cap and term perspective.

While the RFA negotiation process can be lengthy and affords each side the opportunity to seize at different leverage points along the way, UFA bidding is fast and furious. If a team wants a player, they only have a limited time to lay the groundwork, feel out the agent and then make the offer they think will outbid the unknown number of other bidders. High-end UFAs often get overpaid because the bidding team gets married to the idea of adding that player to the roster. It’s more auction than negotiation, and the auctioneer agents are generally pretty good at creating an inflated market for their player. The teams most successful in free agency are the ones disciplined enough to not offer above their internal assessment of the player’s value, or willing to move on to the next target when the first target wants more money or the extra year of term.

It used to be the rule that teams weren’t allowed to speak with a player’s representatives until the start of free agency. Teams and agents paid as much attention to that rule as people do to jaywalking, so the league changed the rule to reflect the reality of what was happening. It created a negotiation window – a period of time commencing after the Draft when teams and agents could discuss deals ahead of the official opening of free agency. Deals still couldn’t be papered or submitted to Central Registry ahead of time, but most players had handshake deals done a few days in advance. Coming out of the COVID-19 work stoppage in summer 2020, however, when the NHL and NHL Players’ Association extended and rejigged the collective bargaining agreement, the early negotiation window was eliminated. Now we’re back to the way it was, with no courtship allowed before July 1. Wink wink. Let’s just say that if a hundred deals get announced within an hour or two of free agency opening, that should be a pretty good clue that nothing has changed and deals are still being pre-cooked.

Even when teams aren’t in the market for big name UFAs, every team will need to sign a significant group of players. NHL-contracted players destined to be AHL depth options are usually signed on a year-to-year basis. Two-year deals are luxuries for those guys. So you will annually have a host of those players to sign. To fill out an AHL roster, factoring in injuries and call-ups, you need an army. In July 2021, we signed 17 UFAs in the first two days of free agency. About a dozen of those were players we foresaw being almost exclusively on our AHL team. The need to plan out and sign players for both your NHL and AHL team at the same time makes July the busiest time of the hockey season for a front office.

It’s also one of the most exciting. So get your popcorn and let’s see where Johnny Hockey, Geno and the other 595 players end up.

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Chris Gear joined Daily Faceoff in January after a 12-year run with the Vancouver Canucks, most recently as the club’s Assistant General Manager and Chief Legal Officer. Before migrating over to the hockey operations department, where his responsibilities included contract negotiations, CBA compliance, assisting with roster and salary cap management and governance for the AHL franchise, Gear was the Canucks’ vice president and general counsel.

Click here to read Gear’s other Daily Faceoff stories.

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From shopping lists to auctioneer agents: Inside the NHL Free Agent Frenzy

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