Perfection is unattainable in the NHL.
Hockey itself is a game of mistakes. The result of any given game, or even a seven-game playoff series, often comes down to a variety of factors — health, puck luck, the referee’s whistle — that fall well outside the control of any one individual.
What’s true for players is true, as well, for hockey operations departments. Like the slim margins that determine playoff success, player evaluation is fickle in nature. The best an organization can do in the NHL is take care of their business to maximize their odds of making a savvy trade, nailing a draft pick or signing a value contract.
Realistically, at this point, Vancouver Canucks fans aren’t asking for perfection or anything close to it. A defensible direction and a coherent plan would count as cause for celebration in the city of Vancouver at the moment.
With the All-Star break in full swing, the Canucks have a bit of time off and club management can regroup from the drama that has overshadowed so much of the 2022-23 campaign. Then we’ll see what sort of “major surgery” club leadership has in store, as the Canucks look to turn the page on another disappointing season.
If the pain of the past few months is going to stand up and mean something, the Canucks will have to get busy selling as aggressively as possible by the March 3 trade deadline. The stakes are massive. Some of the decisions facing the club — most notably a potential Bo Horvat trade — could define this era.
So, what would a perfect trade deadline look like from a Canucks perspective at the 2023 NHL trade deadline?
1. Sadly, Bo Horvat must be dealt
The signs have been pointing toward Horvat’s departure from Vancouver ahead of the trade deadline for a while now. Canucks GM Patrik Allvin appeared to offer a bit of hope recently on Sportsnet 650, noting that he met with Horvat’s agent, Pat Morris, on Tuesday before the club’s home game against the Blackhawks and presented another offer.
It already didn’t make much sense to re-sign Horvat given the skyrocketing price of his next contract and the team’s distance from viable contention. But now Andrei Kuzmenko’s two-year, $11-million extension makes the salary cap situation flat-out untenable if you tack on a massive Horvat contract to the books. It’d be pointless to run the same core back, at more expensive cap hits, for another year considering the club currently ranks 27th in the NHL by point percentage.
It will be tough to see Vancouver’s captain leave. He’s been a loyal soldier — the only Canuck who’s lived through all the pain and dark days since Mike Gillis left the organization. But Vancouver’s in no position to add another high-risk contract to the books and has a serious deficit of valuable future assets.
Canucks fans need hope right now. They’re begging to catch a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel. Horvat needs to be dealt and the return must be a win.
Many NHL teams subscribe to the theory that you need a big, heavy blue line to go deep in the playoffs.
People point to the Lightning’s back end which has featured jumbo-sized defenders like Victor Hedman, Erik Cernak, Ryan McDonagh, Mikhail Sergachev, Zach Bogosian, Jan Rutta and Luke Schenn over the years. Montreal’s big four with Shea Weber, Ben Chiarot, Joel Edmundson and Jeff Petry was lionized during the Canadiens’ 2021 trip to the Stanley Cup Final.
Teams have accordingly paid a premium at recent trade deadlines for large, hard-nosed defenders like Chiarot, Josh Manson and David Savard.
Schenn doesn’t have a long track record of top-four success the way Chiarot, Manson and Savard did, but he fits a similar mould in terms of playstyle and has championship experience. The 33-year-old will be highly sought after and should hold significant trade value. The Canucks need to cash in on that.
Some would argue that Schenn still plays at a high level, is a quality leader and should therefore be re-signed, but his next contract could be a lot more expensive than the dirt-cheap $850,000 AAV he possesses now. Last offseason, we saw Rutta — who’s 32 and plays a similar role as a third-pair quality defender for a good team who can moonlight in the top four — sign for three years at a $2.75 million cap hit with the Penguins. Erik Gudbranson checks off similar physical qualities and was overpaid with a four-year, $16-million contract as well.
Vancouver needs to take advantage of the inflated market for physical, stay-at-home defencemen by trading Schenn at the deadline.
3. Treat expiring restricted free agents like unrestricted free agents
It’s not enough for the Canucks to just take care of the obvious trades before the deadline. That’s the absolute minimum standard, frankly.
This club’s long-term needs are legion. In the wake of a dismal performance in a third consecutive season and the club’s total lack of assets at the NHL level, in terms of draft pick capital and their prospect pool, moving off of Horvat and Schenn is insufficient. The club has to go further. They have to be more disciplined about finding whatever marginal value they can.
That includes seeing if a depth defender like Kyle Burroughs can fetch the sort of return players like Nathan Beaulieu, Troy Stecher and Robert Hagg netted their respective clubs last season at the deadline (a sixth-round pick, a seventh-round pick and a conditional seventh-round pick, respectively).
Collin Delia and Spencer Martin surely haven’t put themselves into the range of netting Vancouver a Scott Wedgewood-style return (a mid-round pick at last year’s deadline), but if the club can trade either netminder for more than “future considerations” to a goalie depth-needy rival ahead of the deadline, that would be a nice win.
The club should additionally be asking themselves the tough questions, while proactively engaging in extension talks with any restricted free agents that will cost over $1 million to qualify this summer. Ethan Bear and Travis Dermott are the key examples here, and they should effectively be treated like unrestricted free agents (to a point).
Dermott’s first full Canucks campaign, meanwhile, has been waylaid by a preseason head injury that has cost him all but 11 games. He’s struggled since returning, but unsurprisingly, his game appears to be trending in the right direction as he gets additional reps back in the lineup. He’ll cost $1.5 million to qualify at season’s end.
Bear has been a solid find for the Canucks, playing major minutes since he was acquired from the Carolina Hurricanes in late October. He’ll also cost $2.5 million to qualify, which is a commitment the club will effectively have to make merely in order to retain their right of first refusal and make him a restricted free agent.
Qualifying Bear is a no-brainer, but it will also open the club up to player-elected arbitration this summer. And Bear — who has played top-four minutes, while sporting an on-ice goal differential that stacks up well when compared with most other Canucks defenders — is building himself a strong case for a raise.
His situation is subtly complicated. The club only has one healthy right-handed NHL-level defender signed beyond this season (Tyler Myers) and would do well to return Bear. His high qualifying offer level and relatively strong arbitration case create a situation where the club will have to be very delicate in managing his next deal, lest it proves inefficient.
In the case of both Bear and Dermott, if the Canucks are intent on keeping them around long-term, they should use the deadline as a pressure point in extension talks. If there are sharp, potentially efficient value bets to be made ahead of the deadline, great.
If not, it’s far better to fetch an asset in a trade for an expiring player, than it is to haggle in June with arbitration-eligible restricted players who aren’t absolute 100 percent slam dunks to receive qualifying offers.
4. Use fresh LTI space creatively
According to CapFriendly and the NHL’s roster page, the Vancouver Canucks have yet to put Tanner Pearson or Ilya Mikheyev — both ruled out for the balance of this season — on long-term injured reserve (LTI).
CapFriendly further estimates that, as a result of Micheal Ferland ($3.5 million) and Tucker Poolman’s ($2.5 million) presence on LTI, Vancouver has $2.23 million in available space at the moment.
Now, there are a couple of different ways this could go.
The club could, perhaps, attempt to shed enough salary ahead of the trade deadline that they get out of LTI altogether. Currently, the Canucks have $6 million worth of contracts in LTI and are using $3.8 million of that space with 20 players on their 23-man roster.
Now getting out of LTI is an attractive option. It would permit the club to duck the bonus overages that will otherwise result from Kuzmenko absolutely crushing it in his first NHL season (Kuzmenko has already hit one of his Schedule A bonuses). Any bonus overages incurred would hit the Canucks’ cap sheet as a penalty for the 2023-24 season, based on the fact they’re currently set to exceed the salary cap upper limit using the LTI mechanism at season’s end.
Unfortunately, getting out of LTI at this juncture will be exceedingly difficult to execute. It also might not even be advisable as a primary goal.
By means of illustration, let’s consider Horvat, Vancouver’s best trade asset. There are very few contending teams capable of eating the full freight of Horvat’s $5.5 million cap hit, for example, without sending salary back. The club’s priority in a Horvat trade, however, must be maximizing their return above all else, rather than focusing unduly on doing a deal with a smaller group of teams that wouldn’t need to shed commitments in a potential trade to make the cap math work.
Pursuing the ‘get out of LTI’ route could limit the Canucks’ ability to extract value at the deadline, and one suspects the club might be better off instead leaning into the skid. In Mikheyev ($4.75 million) and Pearson ($3.25 million), for example, the club has the ability to create an additional $8 million in LTI space prior to the deadline.
The sequencing would need to be done carefully, but executing this could arm Canucks management with the ability to do all sorts of creative things to net futures at the deadline. They could act as a cap space clearing house for undesirable expiring deals, for example, or as a retained salary transaction laundromat in three-team trades.
The returns wouldn’t be huge — a fifth-round pick here, a sixth-round pick there — but the club is well positioned to engineer value out of thin air purely with sharp accounting over the next five weeks. And every bit of value netted matters.
In a perfect trade deadline scenario, the Canucks would find a way to take advantage.
5. Add a protected 2023 first-round draft pick that could confer unprotected to 2024
Every year we advocate for the Canucks to prioritize landing a first-round pick that’s conditional and structured to roll over unprotected the following year. There’s always pushback. We’re told annually that no teams would ever surrender a pick like that; that this is a fantasy hockey suggestion.
Then year after year it keeps happening in the actual NHL.
Teams often overestimate how successful they will be in the playoffs and the following season. By targeting a first-round pick that can roll over to the following season unprotected, you’re opening up the possibility of striking gold if that club falters.
Ottawa took advantage of this in the Erik Karlsson trade (pick turned into Tim Stützle). Colorado ended up nabbing a top-five pick from Ottawa in the Matt Duchene deal. Columbus stole Chicago’s No. 6 pick last year with the Seth Jones trade and selected stud RD prospect David Jiricek. The Panthers are 22nd in the NHL by points percentage and owe an unprotected first to the Canadiens for the Chiarot trade.
With Horvat (or perhaps even Schenn if they’re lucky), the Canucks have a trade chip that can realistically net a conditional first-round pick that’s say top-20 or top-25 protected and can roll over unprotected in 2024. In fact, teams may desire structuring any first-round pick they surrender with these kinds of conditions because of how highly this year’s draft class is rated.
The top end of this draft is excellent and it’s pretty deep overall, but it’s getting to a point where teams may be overvaluing 2023 first-round picks in the high teens or early 20s. The Canucks can exploit this with the aforementioned conditions on any first-round pick they acquire and position themselves to effectively bet against a team for next season.
6. Make sure cap flexibility is a key part of the Horvat return
Assuming the upper limit of the salary cap only increases by $1 million and that Kuzmenko maxes out his $850k Schedule A bonuses, Vancouver is currently projected to have somewhere around $10.5 million in cap space for next season, according to CapFriendly.
The actual number should be higher because it doesn’t account for trades, buyouts and Pearson’s uncertain status going into next season. The overall point stands: The Canucks don’t have a lot of wiggle room when you account for how many needs the club will need to address, particularly with the hole Horvat could leave down the middle.
Canucks management may opt to target NHL-ready contributors in a Horvat trade rather than pure futures. If they go down that route, however, they need to prioritize hyper-efficient, cost-controllable pieces rather than players who are already attached to sizable, full-market-value contracts.
That means the club should avoid a player like Brandon Carlo from Boston, who will turn 27 by early next season and is tied up with a $4.1 million cap hit. Carlo’s not young or cheap enough to be a massive value add by the time the Canucks actually enter their next competitive window. He shouldn’t be the big prize of a Horvat deal even though he checks a box as a second-pair right-shot defender.
The same holds true even for a younger, higher-pedigree player like Jesperi Kotkaniemi, if the Carolina Hurricanes are looking to swing a Horvat deal.
Good teams need a lot of players who can significantly outperform their contract. That’s how you retain sufficient flexibility to build an elite roster without running out of cap space.
Vancouver should be targeting top prospects and draft picks that can hopefully turn into productive players that provide enormous surplus value on their entry-level contracts down the line. Acquiring a player who’s already paid big bucks — especially if he’s in his mid-20s — isn’t going to leave the club with enough cap room to make substantial changes in the summer.
7. Prioritize raw, uncut futures and add at least 5 draft picks at the deadline
If the Canucks are disciplined about focusing on amassing draft capital and managing the books, the 2023 trade deadline could mark a fork in the road for this franchise and their embattled hockey operations leadership group.
There’s no easy way out of the mess that this club has created for itself over the past decade. And while Jim Rutherford and Allvin inherited much of it, some of their decisions have contributed significantly to the growing sense of hopelessness that has engulfed the Canucks organization.
Canucks management has been focused on netting young players as the key pieces in returns for Horvat and Schenn, as they were in J.T. Miller trade talks at this time last year. The assets, however, that will make the biggest difference for this club in the short term and going forward are draft picks and cap space. In combination, they’re the most potent combination in hockey.
Obviously, the club would love to shed additional long-term cap commitments — like finding a Brock Boeser trade, or a taker for Myers — ahead of the March 3 deadline, and that would be fantastic, but it’s going to be extraordinarily difficult to execute.
It’s the same story if you’re counting on a prospective Horvat trade setting the club up with a future top-six centre and a future top-four right-handed defender, too. That sort of trade package has next to no relationship with anything we’ve seen at the deadline in recent history.
What the club really could achieve and would be better off focusing on is simply adding to its war chest of draft capital. Draft picks are cash in hand because they can be used to select young players on the draft floor (and the 2023 draft class looks very promising), but also because they’re the most stable, desirable form of currency to use in executing trades with cap teams.
If the club can add at least an additional first-round pick and five additional draft picks by March 3, that would set the franchise up to begin to chart a better, more flexible, more reasonable course forward.
If the club instead adds a bunch of low-upside pieces in their mid-20s, some of whom are attached to significant term and treasure, then this club will have demonstrated once again that they’re not ready to stop digging just yet.
(Top photo of Bo Horvat: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
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What Vancouver Canucks’ perfect 2023 NHL trade deadline could look like - The Athletic
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