At least we all got to enjoy a nice little spot of melodrama. An offer sheet! Fine, it wasn’t a terribly aggressive one. Carolina batted it back without so much as an afterthought; that fact was more than enough for the Canadiens to be declared the big losers of the piece.

But that’s a bit hasty in terms of analysis and glances over the fact teams like the Canadiens probably have a structural interest in exploiting that particular mechanism in the NHL’s CBA.

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Ok, so the reasoning offered by Marc Bergevin, who intimated that $21 million would be enough of a chunk to give a billionaire pause, was a bit of a stretch. Other than the Arizona Coyotes and possibly the Ottawa Senators, what NHL team doesn’t have the financial wherewithal to pull that particular rabbit out of its top hat? I’m guessing you can count them on one badly mangled hand.

None of this means it was a bad offer, however. Let us introduce, as evidence, this wonderful quote collected by The Athletic’s Pierre LeBrun from an anonymous NHL GM:

“This (offer sheet), like the O’Reilly one, was ill-conceived and doomed to fail from the get-go . . . All this accomplishes is it disrupts the marketplace and make the job of managers harder going forward, including his own.’’

Far be it from me to disagree with our mystery executive, but I’m not entirely on board with that argument. The offer sheet was not pre-destined to fail, it did in fact force the Hurricanes into an actual decision and a large financial commitment. And Bergevin’s logic is anything but ill-conceived. The people who run Carolina aren’t idiots; they immediately understood that by adding Aho the Canadiens would be reducing the value of the best compensatory draft choice to something approaching a second-round pick. Whether one or two first-rounders were involved is mostly beside the point: the crux of this affair is money.

If, as LeBrun indicates, the Hurricanes’ offer to Aho was a firm $7.5 million for eight years, well that’s completely ludicrous. The league is getting younger, teams are building their foundations on players in the 21 to 28 age range. It’s entirely reasonable for those players to seek to maximize their incomes, which you might be surprised to learn does not include selling off UFA years at a deep discount. If Aho signs his next contract for, say, $10 million per year, he’ll have earned $12 million more than what Don Waddell and company were offering. Or, if you prefer round numbers, he’ll have made $72 million in eight years instead of $60 million.

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Dundon and Waddell can preen and do the tough-guy thing as much as they like, I find far too many people are far too eager to gloss over the part where they pretty clearly tried to lowball Aho. And they’re almost entirely ignoring the fact Bergevin has just succeeded in swiftly and considerably shaking up the cost structure of a team against which his Canadiens battled to the bitter end in the race for the playoffs. His influence on Carolina’s finances will only increase if LeBrun’s sources are right and Waddell “has the green light to do something crazy” with one of Montreal’s RFAs.

That, to me, explains why LeBrun’s anonymous GM was railing against the deal, as several of his colleagues are doubtless doing more privately. I don’t know if it was a calculated move by Bergevin and Geoff Molson, but they’ve just sent a message to their counterparts: play with matches, and you may just get burned. Any GM who is inclined to lowball a young superstar RFA is hereby encouraged to step back into line.

At the end of this process, the Canadiens are anything but empty-handed. The Hurricanes will pay a ‘reasonable’ salary to a young star, but now they will be forced to negotiate with a player (assuming Aho is still a Hurricane in five years) on his terms, while he is at the very zenith of his prime. Steve Yzerman’s peers let him get away with imposing a ridiculous contract on Nikita Kucherov a few years ago, and let no one harbour the illusion the $4-5 million he socked away hasn’t been weaponized by Tampa.

Why should any team allow its direct competitors to benefit from this kind of built-in advantage? The Hurricanes have lots of cap space, but we’re talking about a team that is still on the upswing. Between now and the end of Aho’s deal, Carolina will need to deal with the fact Jake Bean, Nino Niederreiter, Andrei Svechnikov, Martin Necas, Justin Faulk and Dougie Hamilton will all need new contracts. Once all those are sorted out, it’s going to be time to sit down at the negotiating table with Aho for what promises to be a fat new deal.

In sum, nothing that just happened is in any way a bad outcome for the Canadiens.

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Also, there is a marked tendency to underestimate the extent to which Montreal and Bergevin have an incentive to go the offer sheet route. My friend Marc Antoine Godin recently poked at the underbelly of the fiscal and tax realities the Canadiens must confront. Montreal tends to be severely disadvantaged when it comes to recruiting free agents, there are not a million ways to say it. The minute a team from a more attractive tax jurisdiction joins the race, the final spread in terms of salary ends up being calculated in the millions.

But in the case of an offer sheet, the Canadiens are only competing against one other team. And if the player signs the offer sheet (which happened!), that suggests the team in question is not putting its best foot forward — whatever motives it cares to invoke for its parsimony after the fact. Thus, the Canadiens can bring their immense wealth to bear, and drop it on the pressure point where it exacts the most pain. Re-read Marc Antoine’s article, and you’ll notice Bergevin and Molson’s offer to Aho was calibrated precisely so the latter can maximize his salary on the shortest possible time line.

And that’s something everyone has noticed. Including but not limited to the players who are currently residing at the top of CapFriendly.com’s compendium of restricted free agents.

So that’s why I hope the Canadiens don’t stop halfway down such a promising road.

Other similarly-positioned players could well be interested in accepting an offer sheet, possibly even a left-shooting defenceman (Ivan Provorov and Zach Werenski would headline my list). It doesn’t mean that’s what it will come to. But if Bergevin calls a GM who is locked in talks with a prominent young RFA, that manager has an interest in wrapping up a contract quickly.

Otherwise he could find himself ceding control over a portion of his salary cap, the way Carolina just did.

Bergevin has a large handful of chips to play with. I strongly doubt he will hold back from slapping them down on the table.

(Photo: Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)