A player earning $950,000 just became hockey's highest-paid — because one rival team finally bid

Sports 4 min 80 sources

The NHL's Leo Carlsson was locked to the Ducks on an entry-level deal worth under a million a year. Then Philadelphia made an offer, and his real price surfaced overnight: $18 million a season. It's the clearest look this year at what a young athlete is worth when only one team is allowed to buy.

Leo Carlsson spent last season as one of the best young centers in hockey, scoring 29 goals and 67 points for the Anaheim Ducks. His salary was $950,000 [32]. This week he became the highest-paid player in the NHL, at $18 million a year [32][75]. Nothing about him changed. What changed is that, for the first time, a second team was allowed to bid.

The one crack in a closed market

Carlsson, 21, was the No. 2 pick of the 2023 draft, and like every drafted player he’d been on an “entry-level contract” — a fixed, cheap, league-mandated first deal [32]. When it ended he became a restricted free agent: free in name, but with the Ducks holding exclusive rights to keep him. In a restricted market like this, no rival can simply sign the player. So the price a young star earns isn’t really his market value — it’s whatever the one team that controls him decides to pay. That’s why a near-point-a-game center was earning less than a million.

The rare exception is the offer sheet: the one legal way a rival team can put a contract in front of a restricted free agent. On July 3, the Philadelphia Flyers did exactly that — five years, $18 million a season, $90 million in total [73][75]. Under the rules, the Ducks then had seven days to match it or lose Carlsson [73].

Why the weapon is almost never fired

Offer sheets are rare — a handful across whole decades — and the design explains why. To pry a player loose you have to overpay and hand over draft picks: had Anaheim declined, it would have received four first-round picks as compensation [73]. Losing a young star and paying above the odds to do it is a bad trade, so teams mostly leave the tool alone, and an informal “don’t poach each other’s kids” culture reinforces the silence.

Philadelphia’s real cleverness was in the structure. The contract was built almost entirely out of signing bonuses — roughly $85.3 million of the $90 million, with just $4.7 million in ordinary salary, and nearly $20 million payable to Carlsson immediately [32]. Signing bonuses are cash a team must pay up front and cannot easily defer, so the deal was engineered to be as expensive and awkward as possible for the Ducks to match — front-loading the pain into the first year [73].

It didn’t work. Ducks GM Pat Verbeek had told peers he would match any offer, and on Thursday Anaheim did, keeping Carlsson [32]. “Matching the offer sheet was an easy decision, as Pat has intelligently left enough cap space to give us the ability to retain Leo,” owners Henry and Susan Samueli said [32]. The number surpasses the $17 million a year that Minnesota’s Kirill Kaprizov signed for last season to briefly hold the “highest-paid” title [32]. Utah’s Mammoth had earlier matched an offer sheet of their own to keep center Barrett Hayton [32] — a quiet second sign that clubs will pay almost anything rather than let a rival set the price for their own player.

Here’s the part worth holding onto: the Ducks matched, so on paper Philadelphia “failed.” But the offer sheet had already done its work. It dragged Carlsson’s suppressed price into daylight. A single outside bid took him from $950,000 to $18 million — and revealed that the lower number was never his value, only what a closed market let Anaheim pay. Compare a genuinely open case: Cleveland’s Donovan Mitchell, an established star free to be courted, re-signed this week for four years and $273 million [15]. No one had to force that price open. It was already on view, because more than one team could want him.

The same question on a college campus

Restricted markets for young athletes aren’t only a pro problem. In US college sport, a body called the College Sports Commission now runs a clearinghouse — an approvals desk, operated by Deloitte — that vets athlete endorsement deals to judge whether each one reflects real market value or is disguised pay [3]. Since it launched a year ago it has approved about $355 million in deals and rejected nearly $90 million of them, ruling on roughly 90 deals a day [3].

The reason the gate exists: schools may now pay athletes directly, but only up to a cap of $20.5 million a season, so money looking for a way past the cap reroutes into booster “endorsements” — and someone has to decide which of those are genuine [3]. In May, the commission won an arbitration case after blocking deals that 18 Nebraska football players had arranged with a marketing firm [3]. Different sport, same underlying puzzle as Carlsson’s: when the market for young talent is fenced in, the fight is no longer over how good a player is. It’s over who gets to say what he’s worth.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

A price with only one buyer isn't a price — it's a permission

When only one party is allowed to bid for you, the number you're paid measures their restraint, not your worth — and it takes a second bidder to tell the two apart.

The number that moved without the player moving

A hockey player scored 29 goals and made $950,000. Weeks later the same player, having done nothing new, was worth $18 million a year. The gap between those two numbers is the whole lesson. It didn’t open because he got better. It opened because, for a few days, someone else was allowed to want him.

Most of the time we treat a salary as a readout — a measurement of how good you are, how much you produce, what you’re worth. That’s the comfortable story. But a price is not a measurement. It’s the outcome of a negotiation, and a negotiation has at least two sides only when there are at least two buyers. Take one side away and the “price” stops describing the seller at all. It starts describing what the buyer can get away with.

Where the single buyer comes from

No one paid a star a rookie’s wage out of stinginess. They paid it because the rules let them be the only bidder. A drafted player is bound to the team that picked him; when his first deal ends, he’s “free” but no rival can simply sign him. Economists have a plain word for a market with one buyer: a monopsony. It’s the mirror of a monopoly. A monopoly is one seller who can set a high price. A monopsony is one buyer who can set a low one.

You don’t need a sports league to build one. A single big employer in a small town is a monopsony on that town’s labour — where else are you going to work? A platform that every customer already lives on is close to the only buyer of a small maker’s attention. Whenever there’s really only one door, the person walking through it doesn’t set the terms. The number on offer isn’t a verdict on their value. It’s a measure of how little the one buyer is obliged to give.

The arrangement that looks like plain fact

The part worth slowing down on is that none of this feels like power. It feels like “how contracts work.” The rookie scale, the exclusive rights, the cap on what a college can pay a young athlete directly — each was built by someone, and each decided who held the advantage before anyone sat down to talk. Then it faded into the background and started to look like weather.

And here’s the honest complication: the same arrangement that holds the price down also does real good. A draft gives an untested 18-year-old a guaranteed job and a structured start he might not get in a free-for-all. A pay cap can protect a league from itself. An arrangement can serve the ones who built it and still shelter the ones underneath it. Both are true at once. The point isn’t that someone is a villain. It’s that a rule is a choice wearing the costume of a fact — and the first step to seeing clearly is noticing the costume.

What the second bidder reveals

Now watch what one outside offer does. A rival makes a bid, and the buyer who had been paying a rookie’s wage suddenly has to choose: match the real number, or lose the player. Match it, and the low price is exposed as a courtesy the seller had been extending unknowingly. That’s what happened here. The team kept its player by paying twenty times what it had been paying — and even the people running it admitted they were surprised by how high the real figure turned out to be.

That surprise is the tell. If the salary had ever been a measurement of worth, no one would have been startled by the true number. They were startled because they’d been living inside the low price long enough to mistake it for the value. The second bidder didn’t create the $18 million. It found it. It was always there, waiting for a market wide enough to say it out loud.

The seat you’re probably sitting in

It’s easy to read this as a story about rich teams and richer players, a spectacle happening far from you. It isn’t. Most of us sell our work into markets with only a handful of real buyers — a few employers in our field, one dominant client, a single platform that reaches our customers. And most of us, at some point, have accepted a number that was “what they could pay,” not “what we’re worth,” because we couldn’t credibly walk to a second door. The mechanism that priced a hockey player at a fraction of his value is the same one that quietly sets a lot of ordinary wages.

Seeing that doesn’t hand you leverage you don’t have. There isn’t always a rival waiting to bid, and pretending there is won’t make it so. What it offers is smaller and steadier: the knowledge that a low number, from a lone buyer, was never a fair reading of you — and that no single seat, not even the buyer’s, can see the whole price on its own. That’s worth holding loosely and carrying anyway.

03 · Lab · your turn

The price with one buyer, then two

A price measures the seller's worth only when more than one buyer can bid; with a single buyer it measures the buyer's restraint. Add rival bidders and watch a player's offer climb from $0.95M toward his true $18M value — the second bidder revealing almost the whole truth at once.

04 · Hope · carry this

The quiet good news under the numbers is that markets keep widening — one more bidder, one new league, one open contest at a time — and every time they do, a worth that was kept quiet gets said out loud, and more people end up paid closer to what they are truly worth.