32 Teams, 32 Players: Philip Broberg (and more NHL thoughts)

The Philip Broberg move should encourage more teams to go into restricted free agency, and some additional thoughts on the Nashville Predators and Philadelphia Flyers rookie Matvei Michkov.

Now that the 2024-25 NHL season has arrived we are going to highlight one player on each team that stands out for the season. What kind of player? Well, a player that could make a difference, be an X-factor, be on the verge of a breakout, or just simply be a player under the microscope and needing to have a big season.

Basically — which player do I think is the most fascinating on each team.

We are not going in any particularly order and continue today with Philip Broberg of the St. Louis Blues. After that, we also get into Nashville Predators general manager Barry Trotz issuing an ultimatum to his team and Matvei Michkov being healthy scratched for the Philadelphia Flyers.

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The St. Louis Blues managed to successfully pull off one of the rarest moves in the NHL this offseason when they not only signed defenseman Philip Broberg and forward Dylan Holloway to restricted free agent offer sheets, they successfully acquired them when the Edmonton Oilers did not match them.

Offer sheets are incredibly rare in the NHL because general managers have always been hesitant to use them. There has always been a fear of being targeted as a means of retribution in future offseason, a fear in driving up the cost of young players, and it requires a perfect set of circumstances to actually be successful with it. You not only need to find a player that wants to sign with your team, you have to also agree to terms with them and the contract has to be constructed in a way that it is not worth it for a team to want to match the offer.

In the salary cap era (going back to the 2005-06 season) there have only ever been 12 offer sheets actually signed. Only four of them were successful — Dustin Penner going from Anaheim to Edmonton in 2007, Jesperi Kotkaniemi going from Montreal to Carolina in 2021 (a clear response move to Montreal’s failed attempt to sign Sebastian Aho to an offer sheet a couple of years earlier), and the Broberg-Holloway deals taking them from Edmonton to St. Louis.

There were a couple of things I loved about this from a Blues perspective.

The first is that I just loved the aggressiveness to not only target restricted free agents, but to also target restricted free agents from a conference opponent that had salary cap issues and could not easily match them.

Targeting top-tier players in restricted free agency is a pipe dream scenario. The team that has control of that player is going to do whatever they have to do to match any offer.

It also require draft pick compensation that might be way too much to give up.

The beauty behind the Broberg and Holloway deals is that they were second-tier RFA’s, and the Blues were able to structure the offers in a way that they only had to surrender second-and third-round picks in 2025.

The second thing I loved about the moves is that, in the case of Broberg, it helped them find a potential solution to a position that has been a major weakness for the better part of the past four years — their defense.

If it works, I wonder if it could open the door for other teams to get more bold and aggressive with offer sheets in the future. Broberg is currently injured for the next couple of weeks, but he has gotten off to a strong start with the Blues.

Let’s talk about it, and a few other big NHL stories from Thursday.