The Vancouver Canucks spent a busy weekend working through various scenarios, considering their options on the trade market and planning to best set their opening day 23-man roster.
As a variety of injuries mounted in the waning days of the preseason — a concussion for Akito Hirose, an upper-body injury to Pius Suter and an undisclosed ailment for Conor Garland — the club’s flexibility to avoid long-term injured reserve (LTI) atrophied significantly.
Late last week, the Canucks, internally, were pessimistic about their ability to avoid LTI to open the season. They had begun to make plans accordingly.
The way they were positioned, prior to Sunday at least, Canucks management’s active plan was to waive some key depth contributors they had no desire to waive and place one of their key injured players on long-term injured reserve while keeping defenseman Tucker Poolman — who is effectively retired due to recurrent concussion symptoms, but has one final year remaining on a four-year $2.5 million AAV contract — on normal IR.
It wasn’t an ideal solution, but it would’ve been workable. Crucially, such an approach would’ve permitted the Canucks an easy method of escaping from LTI a few weeks into the 2024-25 campaign.
Then on Sunday, everything changed. The Canucks finally struck a deal on the trade market, executing a transaction with esoteric but poignant salary-cap implications before setting their opening-day roster on Monday.
It’s a variety of trade that’s become something of an annual exercise under the stewardship of president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford and general manager Patrik Allvin.
The deal packaged the final year of Poolman’s $2.5 million AAV contract (which has $3 million in cash remaining on its final year), with the Canucks retaining 20 percent of the contract, to the Colorado Avalanche in exchange for puck-moving defender Erik Brännström and a 2025 fourth-round draft selection. Brännström was then immediately placed on waivers.
Vancouver had gauged the market on moving Poolman’s contract early in the offseason, kicking the tires and keeping tabs on its options throughout the summer. Until this weekend, however, the price of making the deal was too high and the Canucks had limited appetite to part with assets in a move that wouldn’t directly improve them.
Privately, the club insists the various injury complications that were introduced into their cap planning in the final week of preseason didn’t shape their decision to execute the Poolman trade on Sunday. It was a factor in the calculations but the primary motivator was far simpler: Allvin and company finally found a deal to get out of Poolman’s contract at a price point they could tolerate.
Effectively they sold a mid-round draft pick in exchange for considerable roster flexibility, $2 million in functional cap savings and $1.5 million in real cash savings — and potentially even more if Brännström is claimed on waivers on Monday.
The Avalanche, meanwhile, turned a depth player in Brännström, signed to a relatively expensive one-way contract they were going to place on waivers anyway, into a fourth-round pick. The cost of purchasing the asset was nothing of tangible hockey value. From the Avalanche’s perspective, they created something of modest hockey value out of essentially nothing.
Colorado just had to agree to take on the administrative annoyance of managing Poolman’s deal in LTI — something it’s effectively locked into doing anyway this season given Gabriel Landeskog’s injury status — while eating $1.5 million in additional salary.
It was, in a final assessment, a sensible deal for both sides to execute. A thoughtful transaction that’s rather revealing of organizational priorities both ways.
The Avalanche, given they’re going to operate in LTI anyway and have substantive cap uncertainty to manage between Valeri Nichushkin in the NHL/NHLPA player assistance program and Landeskog’s long-term injury, arbitraged a perceived weakness — their complicated cap situation — into a draft pick. All it cost was taking on an extra $1.5 million in salary, which the Avalanche were willing to eat.
Vancouver, however, was focused on flexibility.
Shedding the final year of Poolman’s deal gives the Canucks a straightforward route to avoiding LTI, which will permit them to toll cap space daily throughout this season with an eye toward taking a big swing to improve in-season.
It will also permit Vancouver to roster sufficient depth and avoid making some of the arduous decisions clubs pressed right up against the cap are often forced into — whether it’s playing regular-season games a man short, or with 11 forwards and seven defenders, or using amateur tryout backups.
Whereas the Canucks were likely to have to decide between keeping one of Nils Åman, Arshdeep Bains and Aatu Räty up front and one of Noah Juulsen and Mark Friedman on defense, in the wake of the Poolman deal, the Canucks can now — provided Suter and Garland are ready to go on Wednesday — comfortably keep two of those forwards and both defenders on the roster to open the season (at least until Dakota Joshua and Thatcher Demko are ready to return).
That’s what the Canucks are really paying for here: a deeper 23-man roster, additional options and more cap flexibility when shopping on the trade market in-season — something they do more aggressively than just about any other team.
It might be an esoteric variety of trade, but in subtle ways, it’s a revealing one. It’s a window into just how much this club values depth, options and hockey fit as the key priorities under Allvin and Rutherford’s leadership. It’s a reminder that Canucks management will keep a prudent eye on the bottom line, financially.
And, of course, draft picks are currency. They’re assets that burn a hole in this organization’s pockets. Currency to be spent on improving the team in the here and now, as opposed to upside swings with the future in mind.
Here are two more thoughts on a busy weekend of Canucks news.
Where does Brännström fit?
Brännström, 25, isn’t a player without value.
An undersized puck-moving defender, Brännström has put together some decent seasons on some poor Ottawa Senators teams in his young NHL career. He certainly brings a level of puck skill and speed on the back end that the Canucks almost entirely lack at both the NHL and AHL levels outside of their top defense pair of Quinn Hughes and Filip Hronek. He’s a worthwhile project for them to take on.
That they immediately waived Brännström after acquiring him on Sunday, however, speaks volumes.
Canucks brass has some interest in seeing what Brännström could become with some time to work with the player development staff, but internally, there’s real concern about whether his defensive play is at a high-enough level to contribute in the NHL in the short term. If he’s claimed on waivers, the Canucks will take their extra contract slot and their additional $900,000 in cash savings and move forward nonplussed. If he clears on Monday, they believe Brännström has some upside to help out down the line and diversify their blue-line depth, provided he can improve his defensive game sufficiently at the AHL level.
In any event, make no mistake, the motivation for executing the trade was about cap flexibility. That Brännström is a potentially intriguing piece is a plus, but that’s not really the purpose of the trade.
Brännström is a throw-in, but as we saw with Lane Pederson a couple seasons ago, a player acquired as a throw-in still can surprise and contribute down the line.
A new phase: Consolidation
After the dizzying highs of the ‘Bruce There It Is!’ run tied the hands of Canucks management somewhat in their first full offseason during the summer of 2022, the club endured a thoroughly miserable 2022-23 campaign.
In the sordid wake of that season, Canucks management went about picking up the pieces.
They’d made several decisions of long-term consequence — the J.T. Miller extension, the Bo Horvat and Filip Hronek trades — but for the most part, they went about executing no-risk deals to build out their lineup.
They didn’t rush to extend Hronek after acquiring him, talks with Elias Pettersson dragged well into the subsequent season, they ruthlessly managed the term of deals with unrestricted free agents like Ian Cole and Teddy Blueger, dealt for additional players on expiring contracts in Nikita Zadorov and Elias Lindholm and inked very few pending free agents before the beginning of the 2024 playoffs.
There’s a through line here, and an important one. While Canucks management believed strongly in their core group of players, they were deeply reluctant 12 months ago to commit to a team that hadn’t proven it could win.
They wanted to add depth, penalty killing and size to their lineup, but they also wanted to maintain a maximum level of flexibility in case it didn’t come together as seamlessly as it ultimately did.
Where the wisdom in that approach is obvious, there’s also a cost in taking the wait-and-see approach, especially in a hard cap environment like the contemporary NHL.
When the Canucks ran preposterously pure at the outset of last season, outperforming all reasonable expectations on their way to winning the Pacific Division, the stable of short-term deals they were relying on left management on the back foot somewhat entering this past offseason.
The Canucks had successfully bought a strong hedge position in case it hadn’t all worked, but the cost of that is they hadn’t proactively captured previously unrealized upside when just about everything broke their way, nearly everyone on the roster put together a career season and the team suddenly became imposing.
Now, to their credit, the Canucks were able to make it all work this past summer. Pettersson and Hronek ended up signing deals that were far more team-friendly than most observers expected. They kept both Joshua and Blueger at below-market rates before they hit free agency, while also convincing Tyler Myers to eschew free agency at a significantly reduced salary level.
The cost of Vancouver’s hedge position was real, even if it navigated the situation so that it wasn’t realized in any significant negative sense.
Vancouver is now functioning in a new, more confident phase of its team-building cycle. It has added significant long-term commitments over the past eight months — Pettersson, Hronek and Jake DeBrusk in particular — while handing out far more term this offseason to depth contributors like Vincent Desharnais, Kiefer Sherwood and Danton Heinen than it did a year ago.
And on Sunday, the Canucks proactively agreed to a three-year extension with forward Nils Höglander that carries a $3 million AAV. This time, they are planning for things to go well and are positioning themselves accordingly.
The Höglander contract buys out both of the hardworking Swedish forwards’ arbitration-eligible seasons and a year of unrestricted free agency. What could well have been a dicey negotiation next summer — especially if Höglander had carved out a top-six role and produced as a 20-goal scorer for a second consecutive season — with an arbitration-eligible player is now settled well in advance.
Of course, there’s some risk associated with this deal. Especially given Höglander converted his shots on goal at an absurd 20 percent clip last season and will surely struggle to match that efficiency again this year.
There are outs for Höglander, however, in continuing to improve and provide value even if he encounters some regression this upcoming season. His two-way game took a significant step last season, and another one could help him carve out a far greater role. If that happens, his $3 million cap hit could represent tremendous value, but even if it doesn’t, $3 million is a perfectly reasonable number for a middle-six winger with genuine scoring punch.
Because of all of these factors, Höglander’s deal is the purest example we’ve seen yet of a subtle new phase in Vancouver’s team-building cycle. This team that assembled itself somewhat cautiously 12 months ago and enjoyed enormous success is now moving more aggressively and with long-term intention to consolidate those gains.
(Top photo of Tucker Poolman: Fred Kfoury III / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
