Report: Various Canucks rumours
4 years ago
Summer is here but Vancouver is still a hot hockey market and such, there is still plenty of appetite to figure out what the team will do between now and puck drop in October.
There won’t be too many big moves over the next little while as teams take the summer off but that doesn’t mean things won’t happen.
TSN 1040’s Matthew Sekeres dropped some nuggets of information yesterday that gave us a glimpse of the things that the organization might do.
We’ll quickly go through those notes.
- Chris Tanev being available isn’t surprising with the additions that the Canucks made to the backend and the fact that he is an unrestricted free agent at the end of this upcoming season. As Matt suggests, they would then use the cleared space to look to add another winger. Based on the comments, it appears that they would be motivated to do this quickly to snap up one of the forward free agents there. The only issue is that Tanev has lost a lot of value over the last few years and it’s hard to see the Canucks coming out ahead on the trade and then add the winger they covet.
- Brandon Sutter is another player that the Canucks would look to move to clear cap space. There is likely a desire to have Adam Gaudette take over the 3rd line centre spot and then that leaves Sutter without a tangible spot in the lineup. It’s unlikely that they can find a deal at this point for Sutter and will need to start the season with him and work to rebuild his value.
- Schaller wanting a new chance somewhere isn’t surprising. The problem is finding a team willing to take on his $1.9M cap hit without any burden coming back to the Canucks. If the Canucks opt to waive him and assign him to Utica in October, they will get $1.075M in cap relief but still, have the remainder on the docket.
- Eriksson is another player that clearly wants a new home but the Canucks are unlikely to want to tie an asset to him to get rid of him. This may drag into training camp.
The theme with all of the rumours is that the team is clearly looking to shed salary to add to their offensive firepower. Now it’s just a matter of finding a match to get a deal done. For Tanev, Sutter and Schaller, it may simply be something that gets solved in the early parts of the 2019-20 season as all three of them recoup some of their value with a good start.
