The selling off of the 2025-26 Vancouver Canucks continues apace. With the talks around Evander Kane heating up and his representation involved, it sounds as though he’ll be out the door long before the Olympic Break in February. That still leaves plenty of time on the table for more sales, and we’d hazard a guess that Kane is not the last Canuck to make a departure this year.

But what about new arrivals? Canucks management has made it clear that they’re not in the business of making short-term compromises and that every move now has to be part of the long-term vision. That means they’re only really interested in acquiring picks, prospects, and young players. But what about acquiring more veteran talent as a means of acquiring said future assets? We’re talking about cap dumps today, whether the Canucks have the room to take any on, and whether that should be part of their plan.

As of now, the Canucks have free cap space. Not a lot, but definitely a workable amount. As of Tuesday morning, the Canucks had 14 healthy forwards, seven healthy defenders, and two healthy goalies on the active roster, along with five players on injured reserve (Derek Forbort, Marco Rossi, Thatcher Demko, Brock Boeser, and Zeev Buium).

And even with all that salary on the sidelines, and even with their replacements already in place on the roster, the Canucks still have room.

Add all those cap hits together, along with the various pieces of dead cap on the books, and you’ll wind up with a current annual cap hit of $94,435,468, which is about $1 million and change under the 2025-26 ceiling of $95.5 million.

But that’s not a true measure of how much functional cap space the Canucks can actually use. As they’ve spent a good portion of the 2025-26 season under the cap, they’ve effectively accrued space, and that accrued space becomes more valuable the closer one gets to the Trade Deadline, with cap hits counted daily and fewer days left on the schedule.

As of this writing, the Canucks are projected to have about $3.8 million in deadline cap space, meaning they could add players with a cumulative $3.8 million in annual cap hits to the roster without having to remove anyone.

And that’s definitely a workable amount of spending money, especially when it comes to taking on cap dumps. Most playoff-bound teams out there probably have a player in the $4 million range they’d rather be without, or whom they would like to upgrade, and some of those teams are probably willing to pay up to someone willing to take them.

As one of the few genuinely tanking teams in the NHL, the Canucks are in a good position to take advantage of this cap-dumping market.

It need not be a direct cap dump, either. The Canucks have two retention slots on hand. There is a thought that they may use those slots to increase the value of some of their UFAs, like Evander Kane and Teddy Blueger. But another option could be to pick up a draft pick or two by serving as the middleman in a salary-retention trade.

To be clear, this could not involve the sort of double-retention we’ve seen in the past, where the first team retains 50%, and then a middleman retains another 50%, and then the player arrives at their final destination retained down to 25% of their contract. Under the new set of rules, after a player has been retained on once, 75 days must pass before they can be retained on again. We’re fewer than 75 days away from the Trade Deadline at this point, so double-retention is off the table. But single retention remains. If a team wanted to sell one of their players without compromising their own cap situation, they could pay the Canucks to do the retaining for them. Or maybe the receiving team might chip in something to the Canucks so as to allow themselves to afford someone they otherwise could not. With so many teams in the running for the playoffs right now, this sort of scenario is likelier than ever.

The best news of all is that the Canucks’ cap space should continue to grow between now and the Trade Deadline. Part of that is a natural result of some parts being sold off. Even if Kane goes at 50% retention himself, that’s still $2.5 million or so off the books, and that creates space now and increases the rate of accrual moving forward.

The timing here is interesting. The salary cap is accounted daily, and increased accrual is brought on by continuing to stay under the cap for as many of those days as possible. During the upcoming Olympics, NHL rosters will be frozen, but working days will still be passing on the official NHL calendar.

That means that if the Canucks can get some business done in the next couple of weeks, like shipping out Kane and perhaps a couple other veterans, then the Canucks can enter the Olympic Break with a reduced cap load, and should thus be able to really hammer home on the accrual throughout. They could enhance this effect by sending any or all of Jonathan Lekkerimäki, Victor Mancini, Elias Pettersson, or even Tom Willander down to Abbotsford for the duration. Why not run a 20-player roster through the Olympic Break, accumulating as much space as possible?

The Canucks only really need to add space in order to be a better destination for cap dumps, but then that’s still a need, and perhaps an underrated one. The Canucks only have so many sellable pieces, and they have an outsized need to acquire future-based assets after years of neglecting them. If taking on cap dumps can yield decent assets, there’s really no reason for the Canucks to not do it, especially if all it takes is a little roster manoeuvring.

The Canucks should be careful in what dumps they take. They are already experiencing a bit of a roster crunch, and while that will be alleviated by some trades, young players are going to keep knocking on the door.

That means expiring cap dumps are the clear preference – those contracts set to end as of July 1. The Canucks could take back dumps that are signed for longer, but then they’ve got to worry about the 2026-27 roster and maintaining space for that.

Of course, if the Canucks can somehow manage to get their hands on the sort of cap dump that can be retained upon and then flipped for value in the future, say at the 2027 Trade Deadline, then that would be the best option of all. Finding such a situation might be tricky, but at the very least, the Canucks can offer something fairly unique over the next couple of weeks: abundant cap space and no intentions to use it on anything immediate.