from my point of view:
1) clearly i am not napping, this cant possibly be considered a viable strategy in the offer.
2) i was already commited to paying him 1m from his QO, what kind of moron GM wouldnt easily pay him 1.5 to match?
3) i just traded a 2nd round pick to get him, why on earth considering point #2 would the GM even think I would accept a 3rd as compensation?
at the end of the day, its a who cares as no harm, no foul. i just dont understand the gamesmanship that was in play here.
if you want to sign an RFA, at least be legit. there was zero strategic effort put into this offer.
i guess thats my point?
1) Offer sheets don't have to be about gamesmanship -- sometimes they're just straightforward offers to free agents. Off the top of my head, I suspect that is true in most of these cases. So in that sense, you're right -- there may not have been a lot of strategic thought put into the offers, but that doesn't make the offers pointless.
2) You had some key players come up for free agency -- without an updated roster it's kind of hard for any GM to know where each team stands in relation to the cap, so while Wellwood at $1.0 million fit into your cap plans, Wellwood at $1.5 million might not - assuming you'd prioritize keeping Stastny over keeping Welly.
3) So while I agree you're likely to match (as are most GMs each year), you never know -- it's entirely possible that you may have to bite the bullet and accept a third-rounder for a guy you just acquired for a second, if that's what your team needs to do to stay under the cap.
Ultimately though, by matching, your team now has $500k less cap room. That's a good thing for Tampa and every other team in the league. I've known GMs in some leagues to offer "pusher" bids just the chew up the opposition's cap room (kind of like at an auction where they have a couple of plants in the crowd to to get the action going and drive up the price on some items). They aren't purely pusher bids, of course, in that the teams want the players involved and would be prepared to give the necessary compensation, but they don't seriously expect the team not to match - they just want to cut down the team's options down the road. It's a double-edged sword, in that it puts upward pressure on salaries across the league, especially for players coming off their ELC (I think that was Burke's objection to the Penner Offer Sheet), so in the NHL that might be a little short-sighted. But in the HFNHL, where we index our salaries to the NHL, it's fair game.
Had the RFA sheet come in at a price that was *less* than you were expecting to pay (and I've seen it happen), then you might actually have been happy. The other possibility is that *no* offer sheet comes forward, in which case you would have had leverage with the agent to posibly negotiate Wellwood's salary *down* (although not below his QO).
Basically, any time you have a player go to RFA, you have to be prepared for the possibility that they'll recive and offer sheet -- and judging by the compensation thresholds, you could probably guess where the offer sheet might come in at - and can probably decide in advance what you would and wouldn't be prepared to match.
As far as the "stupid" comment... A little smack-talk in the league is fun - as long as it's good-natured. It may not have been clear whether your comments were especially good-natured...
This, ultimately, might be why we don't see more offer sheets in the NHL: the franternity of GMs would get too pissed off! 
