Fifteen years ago today, on Aug. 4, 1997, the Flyers signed Tampa Bay Lightning restricted free agent center Chris Gratton to an offer sheet. The deal was a five-year contract, paying a total of $16.5 million, which included a $9 million signing bonus payable in seven days.
Flyers' general manager Bob Clarke had coveted Gratton ever since the 1993 Draft, in which Tampa selected Gratton with the third overall pick. The big center came along slowly in his first three NHL seasons but appeared to turn a corner in 1996-97, scoring 30 goals, 62 points and racking up 201 penalty minutes.
The Flyers were not particularly in need of another center. They already had Eric Lindros and Rod Brind'Amour to anchor the scoring lines, with Joel Otto on the third line. They also had promising young Vaclav Prospal, who had been a center with the Phantoms and was called up to the big club in the latter part of the 1996-97 season (posting 15 points in 18 games and 4 points in 5 playoff games before suffering a season-ending broken wrist).
Nevertheless, the Flyers went ahead in their pursuit of Gratton. They figured Brind'Amour (coming off a 27-goal, 59 point season) could switch to left wing or else move down to center the third line. The defensively-suspect Prospal was also slated for a move to wing.
The Flyers' crafted their offer-sheet to Gratton to be as front-loaded as possible. The Tampa Bay franchise was having severe cash flow problems and some were unsure if certain absentee members of the group of wealthy Japanese businessmen listed among minority owners of the team even existed. The team was officially put up for sale in December 1996.
Lightning president and general manager Phil Esposito knew that he had no way to come up with enough upfront money to match the Flyers' offer sheet within the required one-week timeframe. Espo may not have had the money, but he had a couple tricks up his sleeve.
Esposito protested the offer sheet to the NHL, asking the league to overturn it on the basis that the Flyers failed to comply with a league rule requiring Philadelphia to provide Tampa Bay with a complete, legible copy of the offer sheet to review. Esposito claimed that the print on the faxed copy Philadelphia provided was too smeared and blurry to be read.
Several hours after receiving the Flyers' offer sheet, Esposito traded Gratton's rights to the Chicago Blackhawks in exchange for Ethan Moreau, Keith Carney and Steve Dubinsky. Chicago had been offering the trade package for several weeks, and Esposito completed the trade without telling the Hawks that Philly had already signed Gratton to an offer sheet (which was filed with the league at 10:05 PM and had not yet been announced publicly).
Esposito claimed that the deal with Chicago had actually been consummated about 30 minutes prior to receiving notification of the Philadelphia offer sheet. However, due to the confusion over the illegible contents of the fax the Flyers sent, the trade to Chicago was not filed with the NHL until about three-and-a-half hours after the offer sheet was filed.
On Aug. 15, some 11 days after the initial offer sheet was filed with the NHL, the league ruled that the Flyers had met all required obligations to make the contract valid. If the copy the Flyers faxed to Tampa was too blurry to read, it was the obligation of the Lightning to promptly request a clearer copy.
As such, the trade to Chicago was invalidated. League rules prohibit trading an offer-sheeted RFA's matching rights. The league found no evidence that the trade with Chicago had been completed before the offer sheet.
As a result of the ruling, the one-week clock started ticking on Tampa matching or declining the offer sheet from Philadelphia. Esposito publicly claimed that he had secured the means to match the offer sheet, although many in the NHL (including the Flyers) were highly skeptical that Esposito had suddenly come up with the $9 million signing bonus due to Gratton within one week of signing the offer sheet.
Nevertheless, Flyers president Ed Snider instructed Clarke to settle the matter by making an overlapping trade with the Lightning in exchange for their agreement not to match the offer sheet. On Aug. 21, they reached a final agreement.
Tampa Bay agreed not to match the offer sheet and receive the Flyers' first round picks in 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001. The picks were then immediately returned to Philadelphia in exchange for first-line right winger Mikael Renberg and defenseman Karl Dykhuis.
Unfortunately for the Flyers, the Gratton acquisition ended up creating more headaches than it solved. The team's grand plan was to:
* Install 19-year-old forward Dainius Zubrus as Renberg's full-time replacement on the Lindros line.
* Install Gratton as the second line center, flanked by a combination of Prospal, Trent Klatt, and/or Pat Falloon.
* Install Brind'Amour as the third line center, double-shifting him as a left winger as needed.
* Move the aging and increasingly injury-prone Otto down to the fourth line.
Unfortunately, the plan did not work out, either on the ice or in the locker room. Zubrus wasn't ready to be a top-line player (even with Lindros and John LeClair as his linemates), and his spot was taken by Klatt -- who nevertheless slumped from 24 goals to 14.
Allegedly, Brind'Amour was not happy about being moved down in the even strength rotation. After Prospal got off to a poor start, Brind'Amour was moved to second line left wing. Brind'Amour was still unhappy about playing out of his preferred center position, but accepted the move. Prospal briefly became the third-line center but struggled defensively (minus-10 in 41 games), got injured and was then traded to Ottawa along with Falloon (5 goals, 12 points in 30 games) in exchange for Alexandre Daigle.
Gratton did his best to fit in within the lockerroom, but there was still some alleged early resentment the huge signing bonus he'd received. In addition, there were players in the locker room who privately grumbled that the well-liked Renberg had been given something of a raw deal by management.
The Swede had uncomplainingly attempted to played through a severe sports hernia in 1995-96 and, the next year, dealt with a gruesome facial cut as well as foot injury that needed off-season surgery in the summer of 1997. He was rewarded with a trade to a horrendous Tampa team. Clarke was already trying to lay groundwork to bring Renberg back to Philly, although the player continued to have injury issues in Tampa.
Gratton scored a goal in his first regular-season game as a Flyer. But then he went the next 15 games without a goal, going pointless in 11 of the games. In late November, the Flyers shook up the lines. LeClair was moved off Lindros' line for the better part of two months, and was placed on Gratton's line.
LeClair played some of the best hockey of his career in 1996-97 and he didn't skip a beat with the change from playing with Lindros to playing with Gratton. The line change got Gratton going for awhile, although he hit the skids again in January. Gratton got hot again just before the Olympic break and played well in the games immediately following the break. But then he staggered down the stretch until the final week of the season.
Brind'Amour moved up to play left wing with Lindros at even strength,and then later ended up moving back to center when Lindros missed 18 games with the first diagnosed concussion of his Flyers career. With Otto struggling to stay healthy, the Flyers ended up acquiring well-traveled center Mike Sillinger to boost the club's center depth. Sillinger ended up providing a decent boost (11 goals, 22 points in 27 games) to the team.
On top of it all -- and unrelated to the Gratton acquisition -- there was allegedly a lot of locker room grumbling that new head coach Wayne Cashman was ill-suited to the job both in terms of creating a system and running the bench. Management wasn't happy with the job Cashman did, either. As a result, the team demoted him to assistant coach after 61 games, and brought in veteran head coach Roger Neilson to establish a semblance of a system before the playoffs.
Gratton's final stats for the season ended up looking respectable -- 22 goals, 62 points. He dressed in every regular season and playoff game. Nevertheless, they were largely hollow numbers. A large percentage of his points came during the time he had LeClair on his line, but he closed the season strong with other linemates.
Nevertheless, many fans complained that Gratton disappeared in big games and rarely delivered when it counted. There was some evidence to back that up. According to the Stats Inc 1998 Yearbook, Gratton came away with a goose egg for the entire 1997-98 regular season in their "clutch goals" category. However, the book's definition of a clutch goal was rather narrow, being limited only to tying, go-ahead or two-goal insurance tallies in the third period. In reality, a clutch goal can happen any time a player scores at a juncture when a goal is sorely needed.
Gratton did score one undeniably huge goal in the playoffs. He notched the game-tying goal in the third period of Game 1 of the Flyers' first-round playoff series with the Buffalo Sabres. Unfortunately, two shifts later, Gratton committed a defensive gaffe that directly contributed to Donald Audette scoring the game-winning goal. Once again, he had gone from hero to scapegoat in the blink of an eye.
Before the 1998-99 season, Roger Neilson made a key lineup switch. He restored Brind'Amour to a full-time center role and moved Gratton to Brind'Amour's left wing on the second line. Now it was Gratton playing out of position, and unhappy about it.
Gratton struggled horribly. In 26 games, he only scored one goal. The lone tally, scored at the 19:26 mark of the third period, closed out a 6-2 home win over Vancouver on Nov. 29, 1998. On Dec. 12, Gratton's Flyers career was over.
In a reversal of the initial deal, the Flyers traded Gratton back to Tampa Bay in exchange for Renbeg. The deal also sent Daymond Langkow to Philadelphia and Sillinger to the Bolts. Later that month, the Flyers brought Dykhuis back from Tampa in a separate deal. On Dec. 28, the Flyers sent Petr Svoboda to Tampa in exchange for his former defense partner from the 1995-96 and 1996-97 seasons.
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