The Vancouver Canucks are, reportedly, open for business. The word on the Griffiths Way is that the team wants to get younger and aims to do so by selling some of its veteran pieces.

Pending UFAs like Kiefer Sherwood and Evander Kane seem like they’ve already got one foot out the door. Other vets with more term, like Conor Garland, could follow. And then there’s that lingering question of Quinn Hughes, hanging over the Canucks’ collective head like the Sword of Damocles.

But there are some other tradeable assets in the Canucks’ possession right now that haven’t got a lot of mention as trade talk has picked up: their remaining contract retention slots.

For the span of the 2025-26 season, meaning from now until July 1, the Canucks have two retention slots available for use. The other one is still occupied by the final year of a $712,500 retention on Ilya Mikheyev’s contract.

The odds seem reasonable that the Canucks will make use of at least one of those slots as they begin to sell off veterans, and maybe both. The question is how, when, and on which contracts?

The simplest solution is to apply retention to the Canucks’ pending UFAs, and there’s some solid logic there. Retaining on pending UFAs is tidy business, with that retention slot opening up again as soon as the contract expires in July. And retaining on rentals is a bit of a Trade Deadline tradition at this point.

Sherwood is drawing enormous interest around the league for his wide range of playoff-positive attributes, but also for his minuscule $1.5 million cap hit. The Canucks don’t really need to retain on Sherwood’s deal to move him – pretty much every team could find a way to fit a player of his calibre onto their roster at $1.5 million. But that doesn’t mean that the Canucks couldn’t get more value out of a Sherwood trade by cutting him even further down. Placing 50% retention on Sherwood brings his cap hit down to $750,000, which is actually less than the current NHL minimum. That would allow literally any team to add Sherwood to their roster at the cost of a single demotion, no matter how capped out they were.

A pending UFA who might more reasonably need retention to move is Kane. Despite some obvious struggles this season, Kane holds some value around the league for his history of playoff production, but perhaps not at his current cap hit of $5.125 million. Here, retention could be the difference between having outright difficulty moving a player and actually getting decent value back for them.

Kane at $5.125 million might have a small handful of suitors around the league who happened to accrue their way into excess cap space by the deadline. But Kane at $2,562,500? Suddenly, there aren’t just more suitors, but those suitors should be willing to pay more.

As we covered last week, the Canucks will not be able to retain on their two expiring contracts that have already been extended. Some had the bright idea of perhaps retaining on this final year of either Conor Garland or Thatcher Demko’s current contract to glean more trade value from them before leaving their new teams on the hook for their full extensions. But an unwritten NHL ruling has determined that any retention made at the time of a trade must apply to all contracts currently signed by that player, including extensions. That makes retaining on Garland or Demko so impractical as to bear no further consideration.

There are a few other candidates to be found around the roster. Maybe a playoff-bound team wants to turn Teddy Blueger from a $1.8 million depth forward into a $900K fourth line extra. That’s doable. Maybe the idea of a season-and-a-half of Drew O’Connor at half-price has some appeal to a team, especially given his latest run of production. That’s feasible.

That lingering Hughes question could weigh in heavily even here. If there’s any chance that the Canucks trade Hughes within the 2025-26 season, they probably want to save one of those retention slots for him. No need to worry about that retention applying to an extension at that point, as Hughes won’t be eligible for an extension yet.

Why retain on Hughes? Not because he’d need it – every team in the NHL would find a way to accommodate him for a light $7.85 million cap hit. But if the Canucks do trade their franchise player, the pressure is on to truly maximize the value of the return. The Canucks cannot afford to bring anything less for Hughes than an absolute haul, and if retention is part of that maximization process, then so be it.

This author has previously floated an absolutely bonkers idea in which the Canucks might decide to retain on the full remaining seven years of Elias Pettersson’s current contract with its $11.6 million cap hit. Sound like a strange decision? It probably is, but what if that retention was the difference between a so-so return for Pettersson and one more fitting of his status as a 1C? What if the difference between returns here was a first-round pick and a quality prospect versus two first-round picks and two quality prospects? Would that be worth six-and-a-half years of some $5 million-and-change of retention?

Probably not. Retaining on Pettersson is probably still too outlandish of a proposal. But it gets to the heart of how we think the Canucks should handle these remaining retention slots, and it’s something we hinted at in the opening. They’ve got to treat them like tradeable assets that need to have their return values maximized, much as they need to approach their veteran players.

In the end, a retention slot is an asset much like a player or a draft pick. Different teams in different situations will value them differently. All the Canucks need to do is monitor the market and see which applications of retention will yield them the most extra future-based assets.

We’re oversimplifying it a bit here, but not excessively so. Let’s say the Canucks can get a first-round pick back for Sherwood at his full price, and a first and a third back for Sherwood at 50%. At the same time, let’s imagine that Kane at full price is only getting offers of a third, but that the Canucks could get a second and a third if they retain 50%.

At this point, it’s just math. The Canucks would retain on Kane, because that yields them an extra second, instead of just an extra third for Sherwood. With so many moving parts, it’s never quite that simple…but it’s not much more complicated than that.

If we had to make a prediction, we’d say that one of the remaining retention slots is most likely to be used on Kane, and that the other one will likely be held on to for Hughes, and if that trade doesn’t come to pass, then used on one of the other UFAs.

Really, though, it’s most accurate to say that GM Patrik Allvin and Co.’s job here is to treat their retention slots like any of their other tradeable assets – keeping an eye on the market value and jumping on a deal when the time is right to maximize.

And if all we’ve done on the topic of retention is retained your attention for the last 10 minutes or so, we’ll have done our job, too.