When New York Rangers general manager Chris Drury looks ahead to how he’ll manage his roster next summer, he can be relieved that he won’t face a Leo Carlsson situation when it comes to Gabe Perreault, who he hopes will spend the 2026-27 season further cementing the notion that he’s a rising core player for the Blueshirts.
Instead, it’s the case of Carlsson’s Anaheim Ducks teammate, Cutter Gauthier, that should give Drury plenty of encouragement if he finds himself having to pay up with Perreault’s entry-level contract expiring the upcoming season.
Carlsson, of course, leveraged the expiration of his own ELC and restricted free agent status into a monster, NHL-changing payday this offseason. The 21-year-old happily signed a five-year, $90 million offer sheet from the Philadelphia Flyers in early July. While the Ducks matched the offer and retained their No. 1 center, GM Pat Verbeek surely wasn’t banking on paying Carlsson at nearly that level after he had a career-high 67 points (29 goals, 38 assists) in 70 games last season.
Rangers can fully root for a breakout season from Gabe Perreault
Verbeek and the Ducks lost control of the process with Carlsson — something that might be on its way to becoming the norm for high-level restricted free agents in the NHL. Teams appear to be more willing to offer-sheet young stars who generally can’t be had on the free-agent or trade markets — after decades of complying with an unspoken rule that other clubs’ RFAs should be off limits. The Ducks appeared to be caught by surprise over this new reality.
Fortunately for the Rangers, they need not be concerned about a similar situation next summer. Perreault’s track record isn’t nearly as impressive as Carlsson’s, who has 141 points in 201 games during his first three seasons in the NHL. Perreault put up 11 goals and 27 points in 49 games through the first two seasons of his ELC.
A strong third season for Perreault under different circumstances, however, might leave the Rangers vulnerable to the 23rd overall pick in the 2023 NHL Draft receiving an outsized offer sheet next summer. Perreault scored nine goals and had 10 assists in his final 23 games of 2025-26, showing the elite vision, hockey sense and offensive touch that made him such an exciting prospect.
But the Rangers can fully root for a breakout season for Perreault next season without any thought that they’ll be forced to overpay to match an offer sheet or lose him. Unlike Carlsson, Perreault is ineligible to sign an offer sheet when his ELC runs out. That’s because he played only five games in 2024-25; a player must take part in at least 10 games in a season for it to be counted towards being an RFA who can sign an offer sheet.
Barring injury, Perreault surely will play more than 10 games in 2026-27, having finished last season at left wing on the Rangers’ top line. That, however, will give him only two official seasons toward Group 2 free-agent status. Three are required for a player to be able to sign an offer sheet.
Instead, Perreault will be a 10.2(c) player, which would leave him with two options for 2027-28: Sit out the season or sign with the Rangers, who retain exclusive negotiating rights. By inking Perreault to his ELC on March 31, 2025 — immediately after Perreault’s Boston College Eagles concluded their season — the Blueshirts guaranteed that Perreault would not reach 10 games that season; they had just eight eight games remaining.
Perreault benefited by burning a year off his ELC with the five games he appeared in, thus moving him toward free agency more quickly. But it’s the Rangers who could benefit greatly next offseason if Perreault picks up where he left off and makes a big leap in 2026-27.
“These are the kind of players coming out of their entry-level deals, where they’re typically ones where teams are now trying to get locked up,” Hart Levine of Puckpedia said on the Rink Rap podcast Aug. 5. “Look at some of the deals that Carolina signed with Jackson Blake and Logan Stankoven. Right now, they look like huge bargains. When they signed, they shown some flashes, but we weren’t quite sure yet what they’d be.
” … (Perreault is) the type of player that right now would be a good time to try to get him locked up to an extension before he really pops.”
Rangers’ best comp for Gabe Perreault is Cutter Gauthier, not Leo Carlsson
Every NHL GM learned a valuable lesson from the Carlsson saga about not allowing rising young players on ELCs to reach RFA status. But Drury is in line to gain even more by watching the Ducks during the rest of the summer. Gauthier, Anaheim’s other key young free agent, remains unsigned after the type of breakout performance the Rangers hope to get from Perreault.
Gauthier more than doubled his career best in goals in the final year of his ELC, piling up 41 in 2025-26. Yet as with Perreault next summer, the 22-year-old is ineligible for an offer sheet, having played only one game in 2023-24 in his first “season” after signing. That’s left Gauthier with two of the three seasons of accrual needed to qualify to sign an offer sheet.
It leaves the Ducks with a significant measure of control over the situation that they didn’t have Carlsson. To be sure, Gauthier’s camp, guided by Carlsson’s contract, has some leverage, as they’re reportedly seeking an average annual value of $15 million to $16 million for one of the best young offensive players in the NHL.
Yet Anaheim, with only about $9 million in salary-cap space after the matching the Carlsson offer, can take its time in deciding what to do without fear of being backed into a corner in the way it was with Carlsson. The club could decide to find a trade for someone like veteran forward (and former Ranger) Chris Kreider in order to create the requisite cap space to meet Gauthier’s demands. Or they could look to trade Gauthier for a hefty return before the season starts.
Of course, it’s not an ideal situation for the Ducks, with Carlsson’s new deal still reverberating through their roster. What matters, though, is that Anaheim gets to decide how it will go. It possesses exclusive negotiating rights with Gauthier, so time is on the team’s side, not the player’s.
Drury will enjoy that much-needed comfort level with Perreault after 2026-27. With a slew of young RFAs whom the Rangers would potentially like to re-sign such as Will Cuylle,Adam Sykora,Jaroslav Chmelar,Noah Laba and Braden Schneider, while also wanting to retain cap space for a possible big addition, a Perreault offer sheet would likely throw the GM’s plans into disarray. That’s precisely what happened to the Ducks.
Drury can push for a longer commitment from Perreault — perhaps the full seven years allowed under the soon-to-kick-in new collective bargaining agreement, which might well be the GM’s first choice. Or he could reduce the term by a couple of years if that’s what it takes to ink Perreault, who might want an earlier shot at the market as an unrestricted free agent.
However the negotiations go, the Rangers won’t fret about another team coming in and setting their budget on fire should Perreault keep growing into a cornerstone piece next season. Although the NHL salary cap is on a steady rise and players are looking to seize ever-bigger pieces of the pie, often leveraging the threat of offer sheets to do so, Drury can rest easier. He knows that a desperately-needed potential young building block can’t force him to make a painful decision next offseason as he works to retool the Rangers after back-to-back non-playoff seasons.
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