Bridge contracts have often been back-loaded in the past to ensure a higher starting point for a qualifying offer. For example, a player making $2.5M in year one and $3M in year two would have a qualifying offer of $3M.
That element was used more liberally last summer with several players taking significantly lower payments up front to crank up the salary in the final year to yield a higher qualifier down the road. San Jose’s Timo Meier is the most notable of those as he has a $6M AAV on his four-year deal but a $10M salary in the final season that becomes the required offer to retain his services (barring an early extension beforehand).
That caught the attention of the league and they are changing the rule as a result. Thomas Drance of The Athletic reports that the Memorandum of Understanding for the CBA that is currently working its way through the ratification process includes a tweak to the qualifying offer rules. Instead of being based on the salary in the final year of the contract, it will now be based on the AAV of the deal. To go back to that initial example, the AAV is $2.75M which would become the required offer instead of $3M. Drance adds that it does not overwrite the qualifying offer rules on current contracts, so for players like Meier, it appears that the old rule will still be in place.
It may seem like a small move on the surface but this has the potential to really affect short-term deals being signed off of entry-level contracts. Given the decreasing escrow percentages in the CBA, players are likely going to show more interest in back-loading deals. Under the old system, that means even more players with inflated qualifying offers and with the salary cap progression expected to slow for a few years, this had the potential to do some damage to a team’s cap structure down the road.
Now, players will still have the ability to back-load contracts to shield themselves as best as possible in the new escrow structure but teams will have a bit more protection from a salary cap standpoint. It also may result in an increase in short-term bridge deals rather than the three-year and four-year pacts some have chosen to sign in recent years. The change itself is seemingly rather small in nature (from salary to AAV) but it could certainly shift how things are done in restricted free agency as soon as this offseason.
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