3 reason the Canucks won’t trade for centre depth in the wake of Brandon Sutter’s surgery

Photo Credit: Anne-Marie Sorvin/USA TODAY Sports

Vancouver Canucks general manager Jim Benning admitted during a radio appearance on TSN 1040 this week that he’ll “look to” find a short-term upgrade at centre in the wake of the news that defensive centreman Brandon Sutter will be out of the lineup for the next four-to-six weeks following sports hernia surgery.

“I’ve made some calls around the league the last few days, just to kind of check in on the marketplace,” Benning said, according to Chris Nichols’ transcript. “There’s not a lot really going on. But we’re going to continue to talk to other teams and look out there. If there’s something that makes sense that can help us in the short term, we’re going to look to do it.”

Canucks fans hoping that the club can acquire a veteran pivot to push 19-year-old Jared McCann and 20-year-old Bo Horvat into less demanding roles a bit further down the lineup shouldn’t hold their breath though. 

The reasons the Canucks probably won’t make a deal for a depth centremen are manifold, so let’s chew into the individual issues.

By this time last season, NHL teams had completed nine trades since the beginning of the season. The Canucks completed two trades themselves in the month of November last year, though none impacted the club at the NHL level. 

This season we’ve seen just one trade, and it involved a recent waiver wire pickup in Kevin Poulin being dealt by the Tampa Bay Lightning to the Calgary Flames in exchange for the promise of future considerations.

NHL teams just aren’t making deals this season, and the major culprit is – as it was when the value of unrestricted free agent players collapsed this summer – the flat salary cap. 

19 of the NHL’s 30 members team have more than $70 million in salary cap commitments on the books at the moment, according to NHLNumbers.com. And of the 11 teams south of 70 million in salary cap commitments, eight of the teams are bona fide internal budget teams like the Ottawa Senators and the Winnipeg Jets. 

So there isn’t a lot of vacant money in the system, and cap space is like lubricant for the NHL’s trade market. Right now, the machinery is jammed.

There’s some internal organizational pressure to qualify for the postseason, there always will be with this ownership group, but the Canucks are not in the process of ‘going for it’. 

In precariously balancing short- and long-term interests the Canucks are definitely slanted more towards the future at the moment. Though the club has parted with draft picks in a variety of recent trades, the vast majority of those deals have been for successful AHL players in their early 20s, the sort of players that have some upside and might fit into a longer-term vision of the club. 

“The problem is when you look at those deals, the assets they want from us are good, young players that are going to be our next core group that we’re going to build on, so it’s not as easy as that,” Benning said on Thursday, in reference to a bigger sort of deal that the Canucks might execute for a player like Ryan Johansen or Travis Hamonic. “When other teams are trading young players, they want good, young players back. And for us, that’s not as easy to do, I don’t think, as to where we are right now.”

Now, obviously, trading for short-term reinforcements at centre is a different animal than dealing for a player like a Hamonic or a Johansen. The same sort of logic roughly applies, though. The Canucks are trying to rebuild and they’re trying to rebuild without intentionally losing, and in that sort of scenario, every future asset counts. It’s difficult to see how even a modest deal – a mid-round pick for a grinder-type centre, for example – fits in with Vancouver’s forward-looking posture.

Centremen aren’t cheap. Even as free agent values plummeted around the league this summer, for example, players like Brad Richardson and Jay Beagle still got paid. 

It’s almost impossible to find a full-time NHL-level centreman whose been dealt in-season in a trade that didn’t return another centre. Derek Roy was dealt for Mark Arcobello. Marcel Goc was swapped for Maxim Lapierre. The only real example if Antoine Vermette and he netted the Arizona Coyotes both a first-round draft pick AND a nearly NHL-ready prospect. That’s a huge price to pay.

Even if you’re talking about bringing in a fringe NHL player, the price is likely to prove too rich for Vancouver’s blood. Consider that the Nashville Predators sent the Calgary Flames a fourth-round draft pick for Max Reinhart, who has 23 career NHL games to his name…

Deals are pretty difficult to pull off in the NHL these days anyway. Reasonable trades for credible NHL-level centremen are nearly impossible. 

The Canucks have missed Sutter enormously since he left the lineup 11 games ago, particularly shorthanded. Sutter’s surgery has resulted in the Canucks relying more heavily on young players like Horvat and McCann than you’d ideally like. 

“They’re good players, but when they have to play up in the lineup it puts more pressure on them,” Benning said during the first intermission of Sportsnet’s Thursday night boradcast. “At the start of the year we wanted to keep them and we wanted them to develop properly. We didn’t want ot put them insituations that they couldn’t handle, but we have no choice now.”

Though the Canucks’ forward-looking approach would indicate that they’d prefer to maximize the future assets to available to them, they’ll have to balance that ideal with the necessity of carefully managing the development of their most promising young players. If there was a decent low-cost trade that the Canucks could make to shore up their NHL-level centre depth, the team has admitted that they’d be eager to make that trade.

That deal probably isn’t available though. The NHL trade market is essentially frozen at the moment and the prices for centremen – even fringe NHL centremen – is generally exorbitant. 

Because of those trade market realities, where Vancouver is at in their team building cycle and their hybrid-rebuilding posture, the prospect of the club making a deal for short-term help in Sutter’s absence seems unlikely.