What can you say about Loui Eriksson? Vancouver Canucks 2021 year in review

This isn’t going to be a long one, because today, we are going to give a year in review of the six-million dollar man, Loui Eriksson.

Eriksson played in seven games this season. In his 57 minutes of five-on-five ice time, the Vancouver Canucks were unable to score a goal. Eriksson’s Corsi for in those 57 minutes was 36.5% and he spent a majority of his time on a fourth line with Jay Beagle and Jake Virtanen.

Here are his season highlights from the 2021 season:

It’s been a down and down five years for Eriksson since he joined the Canucks back in 2016 and at the conclusion of the 2021-22 season, his contract with the organization will expire.

He spent a majority of the season on the Taxi Squad and was leaped by players like Jimmy Vesey, Jayce Hawryluk, and Will Lockwood, to name a few.

There is no future for Eriksson in Vancouver. He will likely report to Abbotsford at the beginning of next season and with it, $1.075 million of his six million dollar deal will not count towards the Canucks’ salary cap. Then the year after that, the deal will mercifully come to an end.

This will be a huge boost for the Canucks in the 2022-23 season as they will be able to spend that money on a supporting cast around the young core and can begin to look like more of a playoff team with his money, the Roberto Luongo recapture penalty of $3,035,212, and other contracts coming off the books.

As mentioned earlier, Eriksson will likely spend the entire season with the Abbotsford AHL team for the reason of burying 17.9% of his contract while the other 82.1% of his contract sits on the Canucks’ cap as dead weight.

Eriksson simply does not bring anything to an NHL roster anymore. He’s slowed down and has zero offence to his game.

This was a player who was getting time in the top-six in the 2019-20 season. He has simply lost his game and it’ll surprise me to see him extend his NHL career on another team after his deal expires.

Hopefully he can be a leader off the ice for the young prospects in Abbotsford and teach them some tough lessons that he has learned along the way.

The Canucks are only 13 months away from having Eriksson’s contract off the books completely and hope he finds some happiness after this NHL career because it has been tough to watch his career fizzle out this way over the past five years.

Eriksson needs to play in 23 more NHL games to reach 1000 in his career but I don’t see it happening in Vancouver.

Fans in Abbotsford who are on Reddit will love to watch their hero play and potentially star with the Abbotsford team. It’s going to be interesting to see where he fits in Trent Cull’s lineup. Eriksson will probably kill penalties and get power play time on the AHL squad but you’ve got to think that he is just showing up for a paycheck at this point.

He could be a top-six winger for Abbotsford or he could be a fourth-liner who only plays three-quarters of the games. It’s been a rollercoaster for Eriksson that continues to fall and as of June 30th, 2022, it’ll be time to get off the downward rollercoaster that has been Loui Eriksson’s time as a Vancouver Canuck.

We will all miss the memes.