Boston Bruins: Brandon Carlo could be a prime offer-sheet target

The Boston Bruins has tight to the salary cap and teams around the league know it. Brandon Carlo could be the obvious option to target with an offer-sheet.

Having seen an offer sheet already this post-season, you’d have to imagine there’s slightly less fear about using such an approach. The Boston Bruins have their work cut out, given Danton Heinen is headed to arbitration, Charlie McAvoy has yet to agree a new deal and Brandon Carlo also lacks a new deal.

It’s this which could put Brandon Carlo in the sights of many teams seeking a steady, young defensive presence on their blue line.

Given the contracts that’ll be shared among the trio of restricted free agents, you’d have to imagine it wouldn’t take a big money deal to make it challenging for the Boston Bruins to meet an offer.

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With his contract expected to be a relatively lowly $4.1 million per season and for a five year term, you’d have to imagine a team seeking a steady defensive presence to serve their second pairing may very well be willing to challenge the Boston Bruins in retaining the rights of their defenseman.

His home state team, the Colorado Avalanche have plenty of cap space, even whilst retaining a 50% cap hit on Tyson Barrie. They are very much built for plenty of future success and could easily afford to throw an offer sheet out there.

Erik Johnson is getting no younger and second highest paid defenseman Ian Cole is no spring chicken either. You might not have a hard time imagining that Brandon Carlo would fit in fine on a defensive group that is young and hungry – he’d actually almost be the perfect target to bridge the age gap between Johnson and Cole and the younger cohort made up of Cale Makar and company.

Likewise, the New Jersey Devils could throw a deal out there, as could the defensively strong (last season at least) New York Islanders.

Point is there’s plenty of teams that could take advantage of the limited cap space the Boston Bruins have available to them; cap space that could shrink even further depending how the arbitrator on Heinen’s next contract rules.

Whilst you can argue it’s scare tactics and that it’ll never happen, I’m sure the Carolina Hurricanes weren’t expecting the calculated move by the Montreal Canadiens to offer-sheet Sebastien Aho.

In this modern salary cap world, deals do happen and they happen purely because teams, despite having financial backing and clout, don’t have the space within a hard cap to offer bonuses worthy of their market value.

It may be unlikely to see a Boston Bruins player offer-sheeted this summer, but honestly stranger things have happened and it wouldn’t be greatly surprising to see a team essentially put the Boston Bruins over a barrel.