NHL to adjust salary threshold for 2022 offer sheets

There certainly were some fireworks during the offseason with the Carolina Hurricanes submitting an offer sheet to then-Montreal Canadians forward Jesperi Kotkaniemi, who had just helped the team to the Stanley Cup Final. The move was seen as revenge for Montreal doing the same thing to Carolina's Sebastien Aho in 2019. 

And now, the NHL is adjusting how the process goes down. 

Via Sportsnet: 

As the process currently stands, if an NHL club tenders an offer sheet to a restricted free agent and the offer sheet is signed, the club receiving the RFA must send that player’s former team some level of draft-pick compensation, with the haul going the other way determined by the average annual value of said offer sheet.

In 2021, the lowest AAV triggering the need for a draft pick to be transferred was anything over $1,356,540, with an offer sheet ranging between that salary and $2,055,364 requiring a third-round pick be surrendered. The tiers escalated from there, up to the highest tier, which instructed that an offer sheet with an AAV of $10,276,829 or more required a team to pay up four first-round picks if their offer-sheet target signed the deal.

So far in the history of offer sheets, there have been a total of 38, with 22 of them having been matched.