The Vancouver Canucks will come back from the two-week 4 Nations Face-Off break – or the actual tournament itself in some cases – on February 22, 2025. And that date itself is a little less than two weeks from the 2025 NHL Trade Deadline, set for March 7.

All of which makes for a fairly compressed timeline in which the Canucks will have to make at least one major decision regarding the future of the franchise and its longest-tenured player. We’re talking, of course, about Brock Boeser and the conundrum of what to do with him from here on out.

Boeser, like all Canucks not named Quinn or Kevin, has had an up-and-down 2024/25 and went into the break with 18 goals and 35 points in 48 games, good for second on the team in each category. That’s not a bad season, but it’s a far cry from the 40 goals he scored last year and the playoff heroics that followed.

The American winger remains an incredibly useful forward for the Canucks, a positive presence in the dressing room, and a fan favourite on personality alone. But he is also a pending unrestricted free agent, meaning that he’s free to test the open market as soon as July 1, 2025.

That means the Canucks will have less than two weeks to weigh the various options with Boeser and come to a final decision. With that in mind, we decided to weigh those same options today in text form.

It might seem like the most ‘straightforward’ option here is to just keep Boeser around via a contract extension. And yet, it’s probably the option most fraught with complications.

Presumably, at least some level of negotiations have been occurring between GM Patrik Allvin and Co. and Boeser’s camp since last summer. And yet, we’ve never got an indication that they’re close and often heard whispers that they are not.

By the by, Boeser is in line for a raise on his current $6.65 million AAV. That 40-goal campaign pretty much sealed the deal there. We heard rumours of an ask starting somewhere in the $8 million range earlier in the year, and at the time, we deemed it…fair.

In fact, given the inflation of the salary cap, a bump from $6.65 million to $8 million hardly counts as a raise and is more like a cost-of-living adjustment. Either way, it’s clear that the Canucks were not willing to meet that offer at the time because the extension has not been signed, and there is little chatter about subsequent talks.

We have to wonder what the ask is now. The NHL has since announced that its salary cap will be jumping for three consecutive summers to $95.5 million in 2025, $104 million in 2026, and $113.5 million in 2027.

The free agency pie just got a lot bigger, and this year’s UFAs will be the first to attempt to carve out a larger slice for themselves. Boeser is among them and prominent among them, at that. He’s tied for 12^th in scoring among all UFA forwards right now and will surely climb up the list as other pending free agents are re-signed.

Given the combination of his age and production, we’d currently have Boeser pegged as about the third or fourth-most valuable UFA forward, clearly behind Mitch Marner and Mikko Rantanen and battling it out with Nikolaj Ehlers.

That gives Boeser some serious bargaining power, and that makes it likely that his ask is only going to go up from here, not down.

Which means the Canucks will either have to commit some considerable salary to Boeser for some considerable term or utilize one of the other options on this list.

Those with an eye toward asset management always hate this option. And yet, it’s one that contending teams use on a pretty much yearly basis.

The concept is simple enough. A team decides that it cannot or will not re-sign a pending UFA. Normally, the impetus would be to trade that player as a rental for the best return possible. But, then, the team makes the determination that said player’s contributions over the remaining regular season and playoffs might be more useful to the franchise than whatever return might have been garnered via trade. So, the team holds onto the player as a ‘self-rental,’ and then consciously lets them walk away as a UFA in the summer.

The Canucks are still in a playoff position. They’ve been playing a lot better since they refurbished their roster through two blockbuster trades. At the same time, they’re not exactly flush with offence. The loss of JT Miller still looms large, and if the Canucks are going to make any noise this season, they’re going to need more scorers, not fewer.

On that front, holding on to Boeser makes some sense.

But there are complicating factors. Some might point to the Canucks’ struggles this year and state that this is not a team that should be investing in rentals, self or otherwise. This is not a season to go all-in on, and so if future-based assets could be acquired through the trading of Boeser, perhaps that’s the wiser call. (Speaking of the potential return itself, we’ll talk about that in the next section.) 

The only other option here is to trade Boeser between now and March 7. But even that path can split into two clear forks.

The first path involves trading Boeser, either as a rental or someone the receiving team intends to re-sign, to the highest bidder. Chances are good that this return would be mostly futures-based, as the kind of teams that would be most interested in trading for a pending UFA are those teams competing right now.

When we look at the list of available rentals, we see that anyone ranked above Boeser in terms of overall value – the Marners, the Rantanens, the Ehlers – are fairly unlikely to be traded. The same goes for some of the older quality UFAs, like Jamie Benn, John Tavares or Matt Duchene. Mikael Granlund, meanwhile, already got rented.

There is definitely a scenario in which Boeser is the clear-cut best rental forward available at the Trade Deadline. That should somewhat naturally turn into a bidding war, and that could mean some sizeable returns offered up.

We’re talking a first-round pick as a non-negotiable starting point. We’re talking quality prospects. We’re talking young players on the cusp of breaking into the league.

Whatever the return is, the Canucks will then face another choice.

Do they hold onto those future assets for, well, the future? That’s a fine option. As we said, few believe this is a year to go ‘all-in’ on, and so saving some assets for the seasons to come is smart business.

The Canucks also have a replacement for Boeser ready-to-rock in Jonathan Lekkerimäki. His rookie AHL season has turned out to be a dominant one, and Lekkerimäki absolutely looks prepared for full-time NHL action as soon as 2025/26. Were Boeser to be traded, sliding Lekkerimäki into his spot in the top six for the remainder of the 2024/25 campaign is an obvious and readily available solution.

But it’s not the only one!

Can the Canucks find a happy medium between not giving up on the 2024/25 season and not putting too many eggs in one basket?

Maybe!

There is the option of doing the aforementioned – auctioning Boeser off to the highest bidder between now and the Trade Deadline – and then immediately doing something with the assets brought back in the trade.

Honestly, this is kind of Allvin and Co.’s thing. They turned around and flipped the Bo Horvat return into a Filip Hronek trade and then did the same in turning the JT Miller departure into a Marcus Pettersson and Drew O’Connor arrival.

Perhaps they could do the same with Boeser.

In this scenario, it’s trade Boeser for future assets first (ideally, a bit ahead of deadline day) and then flipping those assets for a replacement forward (or multiple) who is not a pending UFA. The Canucks are reportedly on the lookout for ‘mid-20s impact forwards’ who can grow with the core. Maybe the best way to get one is to essentially convert Boeser into one through the course of two or more trades.

Said forward (or forwards) can then contribute to whatever run the Canucks are able to manage in 2025 and then continue to contribute in the years to come.

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