In Carolina, we designed
Necas’ deal to combat an impending and always uncertain arbitration hearing, even though the deal would “walk”
Necas to UFA. With a two-year structure, we accomplished two things: (1) we avoided being leveraged with an offer sheet in the summer of 2025 that could have prevented
Necas from being traded in the last year before reaching UFA (
a player cannot be traded for one-year after a matched offer sheet); and (2) we hedged this season’s performance by locking him in for two years. To better explain: had an offer sheet been signed this coming summer (after a 1-year deal last summer), Carolina would have been forced to make a decision: (a) exercise the right of first refusal and walk the player to UFA with no return, or (b) accept the terms of an offer sheet. Carolina had been the target of an offer sheet before, so it wasn’t too far-fetched to imagine a world where we were faced with an offer sheet scenario.
We did have some cooperation from the agent because he rightfully understood that the deal needed to be “team-friendly” to be tradeable. In my opinion, it didn’t make much sense to sign him to a long-term deal—if the goal was to trade him—unless it was on terms that we (or another team) couldn’t refuse. I thought it would be more efficient to give an acquiring team a clean slate in negotiating a long-term deal with their own preferred structure and term. In the end, the short-term deal gave much-needed flexibility to an acquiring team and the opportunity to assess before a long-term negotiation.