Vancouver Canucks forward Brock Boeser is coming off the strongest season of his NHL career to date — and, with less than a year remaining on his current contract, the 27-year-old winger has put himself in a good position to earn a substantial pay increase.
Boeser led the Canucks with 40 goals in 81 games during the 2023-24 regular season and added 33 assists for a career-best 73 points. He also collected seven goals and 12 points in 12 games during the 2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs.
In a Q-and-A with The Athletic‘s Thomas Drance published on Tuesday, Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin commended Boeser for his performance last season but also stressed that he wants to see more from the Burnsville, Minnesota product.
“I want to see the hunger — from every single player, including Brock — to come in here and keep raising the bar,” Allvin said. “And when the time is right, I feel that I have a good relationship with Brock and with his agent Ben Hankinson, so we’ll talk.
“For now, his main focus is to come back here and play to the level that he showed last year. And even be more consistent,” Allvin added. “I told him that he could’ve scored 50 goals, but I felt he took his foot off the gas when he scored 30 and we want to see him pushing through.”
The Canucks originally selected Boeser in the first round (No. 23 overall) of the 2015 NHL Draft, right after they fell to the Calgary Flames in the first round of the 2015 Stanley Cup Playoffs. Boeser made his NHL debut with the Canucks late in the 2016-17 season and has remained a fixture in their lineup ever since.
Boeser signed his current deal with the Canucks in the 2022 offseason and vastly outperformed his $6.65 million cap hit last year, finishing behind only J.T. Miller, Quinn Hughes, and Elias Pettersson on the club’s scoring leaderboard.
Although he ended up sitting out of Game 7 of the Canucks’ Western Conference semifinal playoff series against the Edmonton Oilers due to a blood clotting issue, Boeser looks to be on track to return to action to start the 2024-25 season.
“A player might be without an extension and might be hungry to prove that they deserve it,” Allvin said. “And with Brock, I’m happy that it looks like he’s going to be cleared here to attend training camp. He worked really hard this summer and it was a really unfortunate situation last year.
I was pleased, last year, with how he changed up his offseason training and it translated into a better year. Now our expectations are higher. I’m sure Brock’s expectations are higher, too.”
Through 479 career games over parts of eight NHL seasons with the Canucks, Boeser has collected 179 goals and 384 points. He’s added 11 goals and 23 points in 29 playoff contests.
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