Friedman, McKenzie: On the Canucks Going into the Trade Deadline

This morning, Elliotte Friedman of Hockey Night in Canada and Sportsnet.ca brought up some interesting points regarding the Vancouver Canucks and their potential mindset heading into the upcoming trade deadline. 

His comments were then supplemented by a suggestion by TSN’s Bob McKenzie; where Friedman posed the possibility that the Canucks are going to be sellers, McKenzie presented the scenario that the Canucks are one of 10-15 teams still interested in Jonathan Drouin. 

So… where does that leave the team? 

It seemed clear, from the trade made yesterday (in which the Canucks sent out prospect Hunter Shinkaruk for depth forward Markus Granlund), that the Canucks are looking to get young and fast now, which suggests they may look for younger pieces coming back instead of picks as they sell off players. Shinkaruk and Granlund, from the sounds of things, offer similar roles to the Canucks management in terms of skill sets and ceilings – but Granlund is NHL-proven now, while Shinkaruk was still playing in Utica. 

That makes the Canucks an interesting team heading into the trade deadline. If what Friedman says is true, the team is looking to be sellers at the deadline – but they may not be looking for picks, putting them in a situation not altogether different from their divisional rivals in Arizona. 

Which, of course, brings us to Friedman’s second point… 

We can assume, of course, that Friedman was simply suggesting that the Coyotes would move to acquire Vrbata from the Canucks if they managed to unload Mikkel Boedker. For the sake of fun, though, let’s assume he meant a swap of the players, potentially in a package deal:

For Vancouver, that adds what Friedman suggests they’re looking for – to sell off a piece – while adding that speed and youth we’ve been hearing about all year. Boedker is both fast and young, as he’s only 25 (going on 26) and Vrbata is over 30. 

He’s another Danish player, like Jannik Hansen, who struggles to hit the 20-goal mark in a single season; but unlike Hansen, he’s had an injury last year to limit his ability to hit the goal and still boasts over 20 games left this year to accomplish the feat. He could be a 20-goal per season scorer, and Vancouver could benefit from that if Arizona can’t come to terms with their pending free agent. 

That also gets rid of some of the age that just hasn’t worked this year for the Canucks; while Vrbata continues to be one of the team’s better players in terms of generated offense and shot production, his shooting percentages and limited usage have made it tough to see that converted into scoring. That makes him a tough piece to consider keeping on next year; if both Arizona and Vancouver can make this deal work, it’s a potential win-win. Arizona gets a player with better possession figures (and a history of playing well under Dave Tippett), while the Canucks do what they’re setting out to do: sell, but still get younger and faster. 

Bob McKenzie tossed Canucks fans a goodie when he suggested that the team is one of the remaining clubs left considering making a move for Jonathan Drouin. 

The good news here is that he fits the bill of what the team wants; he’s young, he’s fast, and he’s also immensely talented. Even when he struggles, Drouin looks like a high-yielding prospect. 

The bad news, of course, is that you don’t know quite what you’ll get with Drouin – and at what cost. 

The Tampa Bay Lighting hold all the cards in a potential Drouin trade; they know what he’s valued at, they know what a desperate team could offer them for him, and they hold his negotiation rights until kingdom come. To pick up Drouin, the Canucks will have to get rid of something big – and Jared McCann seems like he’ll be good, but it’ll likely take something bigger than him or Bo Horvat. 

Even apart from the asking price, Drouin himself is still a question mark, as well. The Canucks have given young players opportunities this year, but they’ve also held some developing talent in their minor league system and given limited minutes when players struggled. Drouin has shown thus far that he doesn’t enjoy being limited or demoted to improve his skill set, and that’s been a huge knock against teams wanting to pick him up. No team is especially keen to take on a player who won’t spend time in the AHL, no matter how good they are; while there’s high reward in Drouin with the right outcome, there’s also high risk. 

The fact that the Canucks are still in on him is unsurprising, but it may not pan out. 

The biggest thing about what Friedman said that stood out to me is that the team could be looking to sell, but the team itself has been denying that for a while. 

This, plus the move from yesterday, makes it more likely that Jim Benning himself wants a rebuild, but is still under orders not to scrap what he has and start over. By getting younger and faster, though, and selling off older pieces, he’s doing a rebuild on the fly; he isn’t retooling by adding more age or picking up rental pieces, but he also isn’t outright controlling who he’s adding for the future. 

It seems like he’s being told to add pieces, so he’s adding younger and selling off age – which is good and bad. He’s limited in that he won’t hold the draft picks to select the prospects coming into the system, instead having to pick from what’s already available around the league – and as the Shinkaruk trade showed, sometimes that means taking the best player a team will offer you and not what you truly want. It’s not the most ideal situation for the Canucks to be in, by far. 

Still, though, it’s better than an outright retooling. By stripping away as much age as possible, Benning is priming the team to potentially be very volatile (and very bad) as early as next year or the year after; young players are exciting, but a whole team of them needs time to grow. If he’s trying to force the final steps of a rebuild, this is the best way he can do it without outright defying orders from above.