Jeff Marek reveals the league's next young star who could receive an offer sheet

He's right, but the player most exposed isn't Adam Fantilli.

The quote got framed as a verdict on the players. Fantilli's projected cap hit lands in a poachable compensation tier, while Bedard's sails past it.

That reading is correct and incomplete. The danger to Columbus was never really about losing Fantilli.

Chicago is the safe side for a simple reason. Kyle Davidson has the cap room to match any number, and Bedard is a franchise cornerstone nobody expects to move.

Anaheim just wrote the template.

The Ducks matched Leo Carlsson's $90 million offer sheet, kept their center, and then found the punishment wasn't the player walking.

It was the cap hit. Matching a rival-dictated number left Anaheim unable to comfortably extend Cutter Gauthier or repair its blue line.

Don Waddell faces the same trap.

Columbus sits around $21.5 million in space, and most of it is already spoken for by its restricted free agent class.

If a rival tenders Fantilli near $9 million, Columbus almost certainly matches. A first-line center isn't something you hand to another team for draft picks.

But every extra dollar forced onto that deal is a dollar stripped from next summer's problem.

Kirill Marchenko led Blue Jackets forwards in scoring the past two seasons, signed through 2026-27 at a bargain $3.85 million.

Next summer he becomes an arbitration-eligible free agent, one year from unrestricted status, with trade whispers already trailing him.

His next contract projects as a major raise, the kind Columbus can only absorb with clean cap space.

A bloated Fantilli match squeezes the exact window Waddell needs to keep his leading scorer. The offer sheet never has to steal Fantilli to wound Columbus.

It only has to make Marchenko too expensive to keep.

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