After a busy weekend of practices, Vancouver Canucks players were given the day off on Monday.
Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin, however, fresh off of a whirlwind Sunday punctuated by a thoughtful trade with significant cap implications and a sharp forward-looking extension for forward Nils Höglander, still had some business to attend to.
Allvin met with Arshdeep Bains and coach Rick Tocchet Monday morning and informed the Canucks hopeful he wouldn’t be on the opening day playing roster, which was set officially on Monday afternoon. Later that day, Allvin met with the media to discuss the club’s most recent flurry of activity and preview the upcoming season.
On the eve of the regular season, there is still some uncertainty about exactly what the Canucks lineup will look like on opening night when they host the Calgary Flames at Rogers Arena.
“Toch hasn’t made up his mind for the lineup yet,” Allvin noted, prominently qualifying nearly every lineup question he handled with the reminder that “nothing is set and we have options.”
There’s also uncertainty about the health status and respective timelines surrounding Thatcher Demko and Dakota Joshua, who are set to open the season designated as injured/non-roster (which functions more or less like normal injured reserve).
“Nothing has really changed in terms of his timeline,” Allvin said of Demko’s progress. “Thatcher is very committed, he’s been skating almost every day, either on his own or with the injured guys and doing his rehab. At this point we have the luxury of having Kevin Lankinen and Artūrs Šilovs here, so we don’t feel we need to rush Thatcher. I think that’s important for his long-term health.
“Dakota has been skating for a week now with (Canucks skills coach) Jason Krog and Demko in the morning,” Allvin later added. “He’s definitely making progress. It’s been a tough couple months for him here, but being around the guys and being around the team, he’s definitely making progress here.”
Reading between the lines, it seems fair to note that Allvin’s answer on Joshua’s status — who is recovering from surgery to remove a cancerous tumour following a testicular cancer diagnosis during the offseason — certainly seemed far more optimistic than his answer on Demko.
While some poignant questions still surround the precise makeup of Vancouver’s opening night lineup and when exactly the club might be at full strength, in other areas, we have a good deal of clarity about what to expect when the puck drops on the 2024-25 campaign. Here are a few key notes and reactions we took away from Allvin’s season-opening commentary.
Accruing salary cap space
Canucks president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford has always been exceptionally aggressive in pursuing in-season upgrades on the trade market. It’s been something of a signature for him as an executive dating back decades now.
And it’s something Allvin has learned, adopted and executed on in his first go as GM in Vancouver over the past few seasons.
For Vancouver’s management team, changing the makeup of the roster on the fly isn’t a matter of tinkering. It even goes beyond being a matter of strategy.
The trade-happy approach we’ve long associated with Rutherford and have come to associate with Allvin as well is, in fact, based on something even more philosophical than that.
For Canucks executives, there’s a genuine belief that aggressively pursuing trades provides the club with a competitive advantage. To execute deals at a relatively high volume, there’s even a sense the Canucks should be willing to “overpay” relative to the perceived market price of a player, provided the player is the right fit and can help the team win.
As an NHL executive, you can sit around in February and pat yourself on the back for not parting with the necessary assets to land this player or that player in an early November trade. That isn’t going to help your team win hockey games, though.
With an eye toward making in-season deals and avoiding the money-in, money-out turgidness they bumped into at the trade deadline last season, the Canucks have built their opening day roster around the concept of avoiding long-term injured reserve (LTI).
We’ve been over this a million times before, but for those checking in for the first time, LTI is a cap device designed to permit teams in a hard-capped league to replace injured players. When a team is in LTI, they’re permitted to exceed the salary cap. There’s enormous utility in that, and some teams have arguably even stretched the device for their cynical benefit in previous seasons, but LTI space and cap space are distinct concepts. And actual cap space is more valuable.
When a team can operate outside of LTI, for example, they get the considerable benefit of accruing salary cap space. While we often talk about cap space as a face value number, the cap is in fact calculated on a daily basis in-season. When a team is under its allotted cap space every day, that unused cap space rolls over, or “tolls,” adding to a club’s cap flexibility as the season goes along.
As a result, while the Canucks will have just under $450,000 in available cap space at the start of the season, based on the roster they submitted to NHL Central Registry on Monday afternoon, that number is projected by PuckPedia to balloon to over $2 million by the trade deadline.
This is why executing the Tucker Poolman trade on Sunday was so important. The trade-happy Canucks have worked hard to give themselves as much ammunition as possible to strengthen a potential contender via trade ahead of an expected playoff run in 2025.
“It’s easier to work when you’re not in LTIR, with the difficulty of setting your roster as we did last year,” noted Allvin. “This definitely gives us more flexibility.”
What’s perhaps most interesting about how Vancouver has set up its roster is that, and this would require some good fortune health-wise to really execute, the club could potentially accrue cap space more quickly and beat that $2 million-plus projection. That Aatu Räty and perhaps Arturs Šilovs, when Demko returns from injury, are waiver-exempt is a weapon that could come in handy.
With their AHL affiliate located nearby in the Fraser Valley, the Canucks could hypothetically loan and recall waiver-exempt players at the back end of their 23-man roster throughout the season, especially when they’re on homestands.
The cap is calculated daily at the end of every business day. The Canucks, as a result, are positioned to juke the accrual process aggressively this season if they were willing to re-assign Räty and Šilovs (or another waiver-exempt option like Bains) for a few days and roll with 21 players and $2 million in face value cap space on occasion, in contrast with the 23 players and roughly $450,000 in face value cap space listed on their opening roster on Monday.
We’ll see how aggressive the Canucks are willing to be in accruing cap space, but in the wake of the Poolman trade and with their roster set, they have some pretty interesting options at their disposal in looking toward a major midseason trade splash.
The 3 goaltenders thing
We can’t know, given the unprecedented nature of Demko’s injury, when exactly Vancouver’s starter will be ready to return.
What sort of workload will he be able to hold down once he’s back in action? What sort of performance impact could his injury carry with it? And what sort of re-injury risk does a goaltender returning from a rare muscular injury face?
These are open, loaded questions for a club that aspires to contend for the Stanley Cup this season.
They’re also questions that help explain why the Canucks are planning to keep three goaltenders on the 23-man roster, even after Demko returns and is activated.
Unsurprisingly, when the question about carrying three netminders was put to him explicitly on Monday, Allvin wouldn’t necessarily commit to building out his roster.
“Somehow the players will dictate that over the course of time here,” Allvin said. “This gives us a chance to look at some of the younger players before Dakota and Thatcher come back. … If we want to keep three goalies, 13 forwards or 12 forwards, that’s something we’ll work through with me and the coaches over the next couple days, weeks and months.”
While teams have rarely carried three goaltenders full-time in recent NHL history — there are typically only two nets on a practice sheet after all — it’s a maneuver that comes attached to some substantive baked-in advantages. In fact, one wonders if carrying three goaltenders full-time might become more common for NHL teams to consider moving forward.
There are all kinds of rest benefits — like giving a workhorse starter a full night off, not even tasking them to back up — that a team could explore with a third goalie on the roster. There’s also the ability to maintain additional depth without having to worry about veteran netminders being claimed on waivers, as Jiri Patera briefly was by the Boston Bruins last week (the Canucks reclaimed him and assigned him to Abbotsford on Monday).
And there’s the fact goaltenders are more physically demanding today — especially with the widespread adoption of post-integration stances — than ever before. We live in a world now where 83-85 goaltenders appear in at least five NHL games every season. A decade ago, that number typically fell in the mid-70s.
If you want to make sure you always have an NHL-calibre starter between the pipes, the best way to accomplish that is to have three or four NHL-calibre starters. After all, injuries happen; sometimes simultaneously as they did to Demko and Casey DeSmith during Vancouver’s first-round series against the Nashville Predators last spring.
Maintaining extra depth on the NHL roster, and getting Patera back for the AHL, has left Vancouver far better positioned to handle the continued uncertainty around Demko than it otherwise might’ve been.
“I’m very confident with Šilovs and Lankinen,” Allvin said. “Kevin has come in here with a great attitude and he’s a good goalie. His work ethic is pushing Šilovs and he’s responded really well. Those players have set us up well. The coaches will make the decision about who is playing, but I’m comfortable with those guys carrying the load here.”
What would a further Höglander breakout look like?
“Nils has earned it,” Allvin said of extending Höglander with a three-year contract this past weekend. “Going back two years ago to when I was in my office with him and making the hard decision to send him back to Abbotsford and kind of resetting his game and learning to play the right way.
“He wasn’t happy with it, but he accepted it and trusted the organization. And he’s gotten better ever since.”
It wasn’t long ago that Höglander was a major question mark for the Canucks. The promising young forward arrived in the NHL like he was shot out of a cannon, establishing himself as a top-six-calibre forward from Day 1 in his first NHL season. Then he fell out of favour with Bruce Boudreau, saw his minutes diminish and was a regular healthy scratch.
Ultimately, Allvin, who has always been one of Höglander’s most ardent internal supporters, decided to re-assign the young forward — in addition to several other developmental players — to the AHL midway through the chronically dysfunctional 2022-23 season.
Upon returning to the NHL last season, Höglander enjoyed an incredible offensive breakout. He pitched in 24 goals and continued to drive play and bring speed, energy and some offensive dynamism to Vancouver’s bottom-six forward group.
By last year’s trade deadline, the Canucks were flat-out unwilling to include Höglander in any trade packages while hunting for some of the top targets on the market. If it wasn’t immediately apparent to external observers, the Canucks knew what they had in the 23-year-old Swedish forward.
“The way he carries himself, I think it’s important for all of our young players to see,” Allvin added. “The commitment to his fitness level, the way he plays, the way he practices every day. He’s still young and we believe there’s more to come in his game.”
So now that Höglander is locked up for the next four seasons at an eminently reasonable clip, what would another breakout season from him look like — especially given it’s going to be exceedingly difficult for him to improve on his 24-goal haul from last season?
Allvin cited consistency when discussing the next level for Canucks players to strive toward on Monday, but in Höglander’s case, it goes beyond that. While Höglander improved considerably as a two-way player last season — keeping his shifts shorter, for example, helped him avoid being put into situations where he would get passed around by rival clubs late in his shifts — there’s still another level he can hit away from the puck. And if he can get to that level, there’s real opportunity knocking in Vancouver’s top six, with Höglander a potential candidate in the slots projected to be filled by Daniel Sprong and Danton Heinen.
Even if Höglander isn’t going to shoot 20 percent again this season — he’s very unlikely to; for reference, Höglander shot better than 20 percent at five-on-five last season, something Steven Stamkos has only accomplished twice in his storied career as the most accurate finisher of his generation — he can offset that anticipated regression by being a more robust overall contributor and increasing his role as a result.
(Top photo of Thatcher Demko: Rich Gagnon / Getty Images)
