Canucks hockey operations leadership has been excited for weeks about having the opportunity to be real players when the unrestricted free agent market opens on July 1.
Now the market has shifted. Several of the Canucks’ primary targets appear to be signing with their current teams before the club even had an opportunity to pitch them on moving to Vancouver.
Setbacks aside, this moment, and this level of purchasing power, has been both hard won and a long time coming for the Canucks.
It’s been two and a half years since president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford and general manager Patrik Allvin took the reins of this club, and this is the first time they’ve untangled their cap situation sufficiently to be real buyers on the open market. Regardless of whether Chris Tanev and Jake Guentzel sign before the market opens, regardless of the fact that Vancouver’s resources aren’t unlimited, make no mistake, the Canucks still intend to make a splash.
Going into Monday, the Canucks have roughly $15.5 million in functional cap space available, and five slots left to fill on the 23-man roster — four skaters and a backup goaltender. That’s substantive flexibility.
The club will still have to be careful. They have a multitude of needs up and down the lineup. That the most impactful forward and defender are no longer likely to be part of the bidding is also a factor. One that necessitates some additional caution.
Ahead of free agency, The Athletic’s Rick Dhaliwal and Thomas Drance have worked the phones to try and get a sense of what to expect from the Canucks when the frenzy begins on Monday morning. This is what we’re hearing about Vancouver’s free agent shopping list.
The shopping list
The Canucks at the moment, like most NHL teams, are relatively locked down in advance of July 1.
There’s very little information flowing from the offices above Griffiths Way, but from what we can gather, these are the primary items that the club will be actively engaged in shopping for during the free agent frenzy:
One veteran depth goaltender: As we reported late last week, Vancouver’s plans in the blue paint have changed somewhat over the course of this week and the club is now expected to pursue some depth reinforcements in goal. Late last week the team re-engaged with Casey DeSmith, who served ably as the Canucks’ backup this past season.
Plans can change with one phone call at this time of year, but last we heard, those talks don’t appear to be going anywhere. DeSmith is expected to hit the open market on July 1.
The Canucks will still explore their options for some veteran help in net, and appear to be willing to commit in the vicinity of $1.5 million in cap space to shore up the position. There are lesser goaltending options that the club is also considering, however — veterans who aren’t known-commodity backups but have some NHL experience, whom the club will target when the market opens on Monday.
At least one bottom-six forward with speed: The Canucks want to get faster this summer, but their cap-shedding deal to send Sam Lafferty and Ilya Mikheyev to Chicago last week also served to remove two speedy forwards from the bottom end of the Vancouver lineup.
Expect the club, accordingly, to kick the tires on some bottom-six wingers with serious wheels to offset their departure. Names like Ryan Lomberg and even ex-Canucks forward Tyler Motte are among those that we’ll be keeping on an eye on.
During the free agent frenzy, the Canucks are poised to budget a modest amount — in and around $1 million ideally — on a bottom-six winger to bring some speed and grit to their bottom-six mix.
One left-handed defender: With both Nikita Zadorov and Ian Cole bound for the open market, the Canucks will need to find a left-handed third-pair defender to shore up their blue-line mix in free agency.
That won’t be an easy task. The market prices for defenders on Monday may shock a lot of Canucks fans.
In fact, the shockwaves simply from the anticipation of wild money for defenders are already being felt around the league.
Talks fell apart between the Canucks and Zadorov over the weekend, in part due to money, but also partly due to Zadorov’s desire to play a more prominent role going forward. Zadorov’s agent Dan Milstein is expected to provide an update of sorts explaining his client’s decision to test the open market on Monday.
Vancouver also re-engaged with Ian Cole this weekend, which came as something of a surprise.
Negotiations were dormant between the two sides for most of the offseason, until the past few days. Despite the team’s regard for Cole and the familiarity between the two sides, our understanding is that the Canucks never got particularly close to closing the deal in those talks.
Based on what we’re hearing, it seems that Vancouver is hopeful of adding a left-handed defender at a responsible price point on Monday. Our expectation is that the Canucks would prefer to shop for options that cost somewhere in the neighbourhood of $2 million per season, but the best-laid plans can change in a hurry in a buyer’s market, or if the right target is available.
In any event, offers in that sort of neighbourhood weren’t in the same ballpark as what Cole’s camp believes he can command on the open market.
Keep an eye out as well for the Canucks potentially shopping in the secondary market for blue-line help on Monday. Among those defenders who weren’t tendered qualifying offers on Sunday and are suddenly bound for market, we’ve been told to watch for Vancouver to show at least some interest in Jake Bean, Pierre-Olivier Joseph and Adam Boqvist.
At least one top-six forward: This has been the club’s top priority all summer: an established scoring forward (or two) to add creativity and a dynamic goal-scoring threat to the top of the club’s lineup.
Now that Vancouver’s top target is on the verge of signing, however, our understanding is that the team could opt to remove all their eggs from a single basket and chase multiple top-six forwards in an effort to build out a more balanced offensive attack.
This is the club’s most significant need. It’s the area where the Canucks will likely proportion the bulk of their $15.5 million in cap space too on Monday.
The blue-line market
A lot of Canucks fans were hopeful that Vancouver might land Surrey, B.C., native Brenden Dillon to add some grit and heaviness to their defence corps in the event that the team was unable to retain Zadorov.
The Canucks do have interest in Dillon, who played last season for the Winnipeg Jets, but it doesn’t seem as if Vancouver will be able to compete with the expected front-runners for Dillon’s services on Monday. We’re looking at the New Jersey Devils, Los Angeles Kings and Boston Bruins as the probable teams in the mix for Dillon.
Another name that would appear to be a fit for Rick Tocchet’s systematic preferences is veteran blue-liner Joel Edmundson. Edmundson stands 6-foot-5 and is a reliable, heavy presence on the back-end. While the fit would seem to make sense, when we checked in on it Sunday afternoon, all indications were that the team was more likely to go in a different direction.
While we’re still waiting for the big dominoes to fall on the defender market, it’s becoming clear that competition for blue-line help is going to be intense on Monday. And when there’s both significant demand and limited supply, you tend to see massive prices paid.
We’ve already seen some public indications of this — the high acquisition price paid by the Utah Hockey Club for both John Marino and Mikhail Sergachev, the Dylan DeMelo extension, even the Tyler Myers extension came in at a price point that surprised some Canucks fans — but within the industry, the valuation on some of the top free agent defenders is expected to be eye-popping on Monday morning.
On the established scoring winger file, there’s no question that Guentzel would’ve been a perfect fit. And if he’d made it to market, we understand that Vancouver would’ve been high on his list, a very serious contender for his services.
That Tampa Bay was able to clear space and lock up the player has got to be disappointing for the Canucks, but this is always how it works at this time of year. The club always understood that, and will still have a variety of options to bolster their top-six forward mix during the free agent frenzy on Monday.
We know that the team has varying levels of interest in wingers Tyler Toffoli, Chandler Stephenson and Jason Zucker, although they’re far from the only team in the mix for those players. On Toffoli there’s some rumblings in the industry that Vancouver will be priced out on Monday, given the demand for his services.
In any event, Vancouver’s potential options go well beyond that short list.
Would it surprise us if the Canucks heavily courted the likes of Jonathan Marchessault, Teuvo Teräväinen and Anthony Duclair tomorrow? It would not.
Over the weekend, however, we did check in to see if Vancouver might pursue two big-name unrestricted free agent forwards in Steven Stamkos and Jeff Skinner. Connections abound between organizational leadership and both players (Tocchet coached Stamkos in his rookie year, Rutherford drafted Skinner), but as of Sunday evening, based on the best intel we could gather, the club didn’t seem to be showing interest. Same goes for Toronto Maple Leafs forward Tyler Bertuzzi, who is now bound for market after talks between his camp and the Maple Leafs broke down on Sunday night. As always at this silliest time of year, however, things can change with one phone call tomorrow morning.
The Canucks’ positioning on the scoring winger market is especially tough to gauge at the moment, in part because the market for the top scoring wingers is unusually fluid just hours out from the beginning of the frenzy.
Contract talks involving the two biggest name pending free agent wingers — Guentzel and the Tampa Bay Lightning, and Sam Reinhart and the Florida Panthers — have gone down to the wire, further complicating the overall market.
Whatever dominoes continue to fall on Sunday evening will have a significant knock-on effect on the shape of Monday’s free agent frenzy.
What we know is that the Canucks think this team is close to making serious noise. They’ve identified additional scoring help as the thing they most require to put their group over the top. Accordingly, Rutherford and Allvin will be aggressive to land that piece in some fashion this summer.
(Photo of Patrik Allvin and Jim Rutherford: Jeff Vinnick / NHLI via Getty Images)