Quoting: EnvironmentalTwister
You can't walk away from an arb award unless it's over 4.5 million I believe. If they don't sign him before arb, they're forced to pay him that money or trade him.
They would move him before the qualification date is what I'm saying. If the max they can offer him is, say 3.2 million for a year, and he's already turned that down, then the easiest option might be to not qualify him at all like Vancouver did with Ben Hutton. He would then become a UFA and could sign wherever for whatever. Or they could trade his rights to someone who would qualify him and then they could hammer out the extension. That's the ideal solution since the Oilers gave up assets to get him so they should get something back. The question is, does anyone want AA for much more than his qualifying offer of 3ish million in a flat cap world?
My point being, the Oilers really don't have the room for AA if he wants anything more than his qualifying offer basically. So if it's clear he's not going to accept that, then you either trade him before formally extending the qualifying offer or you don't extend the offer at all and he becomes a UFA, so the Oilers avoid the arbitration process all together.
Or if you really believe in the kid, then you can qualify him and hammer out the extension but doing that would necessitate some other moves being made on the roster and I don't see many options where they end up a better overall team on paper with AA making like 4million or something.
He should just take the qualifying offer with the Oilers and bet on scoring a bajillion points with McDavid so that someone else can overpay him later when more teams have money to throw around.