There’s a hot rumour floating around that Vancouver and Tampa Bay are talking trade involving Vincent Lecavalier. In fact, the juicy bit of that rumour is that Vancouver is a LEADING candidate to land Vinny this off-season.

Now I have read a few different packages on what Vancouver would have to offer to get Lecavalier. But the two main ones I have seen include either Schneider and Edler or Schneider and Bieksa. I think the Schneider/Edler package has a bit more legs, and it seems more folks are talking about that bundle.

Now I will assume that there are other components, such as draft picks and potentially some other minor bits to this trade.

But let’s look at this trade for the Canucks – does it offer any real value right now?

First of all, Vancouver fans around the world would go mental if the Canucks landed Lecavalier. Literally, the whole town and the outlying suburbs would have to be committed.

But it offers some huge challenges for Canucks management to overcome.

1. You HAVE to lock up Luongo. There is no arguing this. If you are going to trade away your “goalie of the future”, then you need to lock up your “goalie of the present” for a while.

2. The Canucks were already in need of one top 4 defenseman. Now they will need to get two. How do you afford to have Vinny at 7.7m, Luongo at 6.75m, re-sign the Sedins AND go and get two top 4 defenseman. To me that seems like an impossible feat.

There is ONLY one way to solve that problem. The solution is to offer Luongo and the Sedins long-term contracts. These contracts would probably have to be a minimum of 8 years and would likely have to average out to $5m per player.

Even if they do that, that would put the Canucks salary for 2009-10 at approximately $50m for only 14 players.
In other words, the Canucks could not have the Vinny, Luongo and the Sedins on the same time.

So the bigger question is: would you rather have: the Sedins or Vincent Lecavalier?

The answer to that question in a salary cap world is simple: the Sedins. Daniel and Henrik offer more value for the dollar than Vinny. Let’s compare Vinny to the Sedins in the past four seasons. In that time, the Sedins have combined to miss exactly ONE regular season game. They are eerily consistent. Now, Vinny has only missed 8 games in that same time, but he’s only one player.
In the past four seasons, Henrik is +58, Daniel is +56. Vinny is -24.

In fact, in their careers, Daniel is +80 and Henrik is +97, both playing 8 full seasons. For both of them, their ONLY season where they were below 0 in +/- was their rookie season.
Vincent Lecavalier is a career -89 over 10 NHL seasons, and has only has 3 seasons where his +/- was above 0 (+2, +4, +23, the year TBY won the Stanley Cup).  So that is a combined 14 seasons of + hockey from the Sedins, and only three from Vinny.

I realise that I am only looking at one stat, but it’s hard to compare other stats here, because you are comparing one player versus two.
But just to compare Henrik to Vinny, in the last four seasons, Henrik has had more assists than Vinny every year, and has had the same or more points than Vinny in two of the past four years.

So right now, unless Gillis can work some serious black magic and voodoo those contracts down to size, I’m taking the Sedins over Vinny.

How about you?

-Cam Davie