The rebuilding of the Vancouver Canucks continues, and as it does, it slowly but surely begins to take shape.

We’ve already experienced the big trade involving Quinn Hughes and the expected trade involving Kiefer Sherwood. We’ve been told that the team is now committed to a long-term approach with no shortcuts. And it has been strongly hinted that more trades are coming, and maybe a lot of them.

The main discussion around the team, then, has centred around who should stay and who should go. The idea being that, as Jim Rutherford put it himself, the team has to decide which veterans are best shipped out for future currency, and which should be kept around to mentor and insulate the next generation.

If there’s one thing that everyone seems to agree the Canucks should not be doing, it’s adding veterans. But what if there’s a ‘have your cake and eat it, too’ approach available? There’s another thing the Canucks could and probably should be doing here, and it might be an underrated and understated component of the steps to a successful rebuild.

It’s all about finding the next Kiefer Sherwood. Or, ideally, the next Kiefer Sherwoods.

The Canucks ultimately paid very little for Sherwood and got a whole lot out of him. Heck, forget the one-and-a-half seasons of exciting on-ice memories and NHL records. Sherwood was acquired at the cost of no assets and a mere two-year, $1.5 million AAV free agent contract, and in the end, he was shipped out for two second-round picks and a long-shot prospect.

That’s an excellent return on investment. That’s great asset management.

Unfortunately, there are precious few remaining opportunities to cash in to the same degree left on the Vancouver roster. The remaining collection of UFAs, including Evander Kane, Teddy Blueger, and David Kämpf, will return mid-to-late round picks. Most of the veterans on longer-term contracts, like Jake DeBrusk and Drew O’Connor, would be lucky to return a single second.

Some of the bigger-ticket veterans, like Conor Garland, Filip Hronek, or even Elias Pettersson, might return something larger, or even a fair bit larger, but the Canucks seem reticent to trade such players. Maybe the likes of Marcus Pettersson or Tyler Myers return the equivalent of a first, but even they appear to be only tangentially ‘on the block.’

The Canucks are, point blank, going to need more future-based assets than they currently have on hand. More picks and prospects. That’s a fairly natural consequence of avoiding the call of a rebuild for so long, and for having made so many of those short-term compromises in the past. But where are those future assets going to come from?

This is where we get into the idea of the ‘next Sherwood.’

In all this talk of which veterans to keep, and which to deal away, there’s been surprisingly little talk of a third approach – trading veterans away, replacing them with free agents on short-term deals (a la Sherwood), and then also trading those veterans away when the time comes. It’s a way to double-dip on the whole selling process, and there’s really not much reason not to do it.

Everyone agrees that the Canucks need some vets on hand to prevent icing a lineup completely comprised of rookies and sophomores. But there’s no saying that the veterans need to come from the current crop.

The Canucks, under GM Patrik Allvin and POHO Jim Rutherford, have actually had some decent luck at signing these sorts of players. We realize that the odds of another UFA turning out as well as Sherwood are long. But someone doesn’t need to play that well to be a success.

The Canucks could have, and probably should have, cashed in similarly on Pius Suter. And Dakota Joshua. And Andrei Kuzmenko. And Derek Forbort. And Kevin Lankinen, if we’re being honest.

All are players that the Canucks picked up as free agents at a relatively low cost. All outperformed those contracts. But instead of cashing out, the Canucks doubled down. They attempted to retain and re-sign all of these players, and none of those decisions really worked out in their favour.

Sherwood is the first of the bunch to be traded anywhere near his peak value. But he should not be the last.

We can use a couple of examples to really illustrate the approach we are advocating here. We’ll use Garland first. Some want Garland to be traded because he’s one of the few players remaining on the roster who might return a good haul. Others want him retained for leadership purposes and because the team needs at least a veteran or two capable of playing in the top six.

But why not both? The Canucks could sell Garland off to the highest bidder, and then use some of the cap space gleaned from the trade to shop for a replacement this summer. All they need to do is find a UFA who has some top six potential and offer them increased ice time in lieu of a longer-term commitment.

The team won’t hit on every free agent bet it makes in this way, but it doesn’t have to. For the cap space Garland represented, the Canucks could probably sign at least two replacement candidates. When one doesn’t work out, trade them for a song. Let the other one build up value, then flip them, too, when the time is right. All they really need to fill in is another Sherwood, Suter, or Joshua type.

Keeping Garland on the roster prevents the team from recouping any future assets. Trading Garland without finding a replacement leaves the rebuild uninsulated. But trading Garland now, replacing him, and then eventually trading that replacement yields two different sets of future assets, and includes some insulation along the way.

It really is a ‘best of both worlds’ approach.

It doesn’t have to be Garland. The same thinking can be applied all over the depth chart. Want to cash in on Marcus Pettersson, but don’t want to leave the younger Elias Pettersson and Zeev Buium alone on the left side? Find another Forbort on the free agency market, sign him to replace Marcus, and then flip that player a year or two down the road.

Doing this a couple of times over should result in a buildup of the exact sort of assets the Canucks are short on.

The hard part, of course, is picking out which players to sign. No one knew Sherwood would turn out like this; otherwise, it would have cost a lot more than $1.5 million to sign him. But on this front, the Canucks have a good track record. They’ve either employed pro scouting to find players on the cusp of a breakout (like Sherwood and Joshua) or employed patience to sign a player for cheap later in the offseason (like Suter). A few more hits like that could be what it takes to really stock the prospect cupboards moving forward – and there’s really not much reason we can see for the Canucks to not at least try this approach.