Canucks Sign Markstrom to Two-Year Deal

Vancouver’s busy afternoon continues, as the club announced that they have re-signed goaltender Jacob Markstrom to a two-year contract. With Eddie Lack now a Carolina Hurricane, Markstrom will be expected to play a significant role next season.

Let’s have a look after the jump.

Jim Benning has expressed confidence in Markstrom numerous times this summer, saying that the no-longer-young goalie is “ready now” to play in the NHL. Certainly Markstrom’s AHL performance to date is reflective of a guy who’s capable of being a full-time NHLer, as he’s dominated the minors for years now. Last season, Markstrom posted an incredible 0.934 save percentage in the regular season, before following that up with a 0.925 in the playoffs – his best “crunch time” performance to date.

We also know that Markstrom has made significant adjustments to his game this past year, working on being more on top of the play and tracking pucks better, so we know he’s a different goalie than the one that arrived in Vancouver in 2013-14. Unfortunately, his AHL performance was just more of the same from him, so we can’t say with any certainty that Markstrom is better.

And to even be a viable backup, Markstrom has to get much, much better. He’s been among the very worst goalies to play in the NHL since 2010, and while this may be partly variance driven, it doesn’t change the fact that his performance needs to get much better in extremely short order. Based on prior NHL performance and basic goalie aging models, Vancouver is more likely than not to be among the worst goaltended teams in the NHL this upcoming season. And with a leaky defense, that could be absolutely disastrous.

Two years and $1.55 million per season isn’t much of a commitment to make to an NHL goalie though, so this deal doesn’t pose too much of a financial risk. If Markstrom can finally translate his game to the NHL level, he could prove to be a bargain.

That’s a massive “if,” however.