The Vancouver Canucks traded Tucker Poolman and a fourth-round pick in 2025 to the Colorado Avalanche for Erik Brannstrom on Sunday. Brannstrom was subsequently placed on waivers by Vancouver with the purpose of reassignment to Abbotsford, the club’s AHL affiliate.
Poolman, 31, signed a four-year contract with the Canucks in 2021 but hasn’t played for the team since October 2022. Vancouver will retain 20 percent of Poolman’s $2.5 million cap hit for the final season of the deal.
Brannstrom was the key piece for the Ottawa Senators when they traded Mark Stone to the Vegas Golden Knights in February 2019. He spent parts of six seasons with the Senators, recording seven goals and 62 assists across 266 NHL games. The 25-year-old defenseman wasn’t tendered a qualifying offer by Ottawa this offseason and he signed a one-year, $900,000 contract with Colorado as a free agent.
Why the Canucks made this trade
This is a shrewd, creative trade by the Canucks to open up in-season cap flexibility.
Poolman hasn’t played a game since the 2022-23 season and was going to miss the entire 2024-25 campaign. By clearing his contract off the books, Vancouver is under the salary cap and no longer needs to use LTIR. This means that the Canucks can begin accruing cap space that they can wield at the trade deadline to make roster upgrades.
Last year, the Canucks were in LTIR. The only reason they were able to acquire Nikita Zadorov is because they cleared Anthony Beauvillier’s $4.1 million cap hit in a prior midseason trade with Chicago and the Elias Lindholm acquisition required the Canucks to send back Andrei Kuzmenko’s $5.5 million cap hit. Vancouver doesn’t have any expandable players on bloated salaries this year, so it would have been very difficult for the club to make dollar-in, dollar-out trades at the deadline if it was still in LTIR.
The cap benefit is by far the most important win for the Canucks in this trade. But if Brannstrom clears waivers, he’ll be a nice piece to enhance the club’s left-side blue-line depth. The Canucks’ second and third pairs on defence boast tons of size and defensive ability (all four of Carson Soucy, Tyler Myers, Derek Forbort and Vincent Desharnais are between 6-foot-4 and 6-foot-7), but it’s fair to wonder if they have enough mobility and puck-moving. Brännström would be a decent call-up option to remedy that if it becomes an issue. Brannstrom is undersized and isn’t the most reliable defensively, but he drove strong underlying results on the third pair for the Senators in 76 games last season. The Canucks’ left-side depth was looking a bit precarious — Soucy and Forbort played less than 41 games last year because of injury and the next left-handed defender up, Christian Wolanin, played zero NHL games for the Canucks last year.
Required reading
• Canucks notebook: Cuts, roster battles, new-look lines and salary-cap options
• Canucks 23-man roster projection 2.0: Who is a lock? Who is on the bubble?
(Photo of Tucker Poolman: Gregory Fisher / USA Today)
