With less than 24 hours to go until free agency, it feels like we're riding up the first big hill of a roller coaster, getting ready to plunge down into the unknown after 9 a.m. PT on Wednesday.
Maybe it'll turn out that we're on a kiddie ride, and the descent will be relatively gentle.
After declaring that his primary objective when he took over the Canucks was to clear cap space in order to start re-tooling the roster, Jim Rutherford admitted to
Iain MacIntyre of Sportsnet on Sunday that he's not where he'd hoped to be as buying season opens on Wednesday.
"We haven't cleared as much cap space as we would have liked to," Rutherford said. "We'll be active on Wednesday to a certain point, but we're not going to be in on the big guys — the real big guys. We'll look for complementary players and build more depth and things like that. But we're not in the position that we had hoped to be at this point in time."
On Tuesday, Rutherford and Patrik Allvin freed up some roster and cap space by choosing not to issue qualifying offers to their three remaining restricted free agents with arbitration rights: Juho Lammikko, Matthew Highmore and Justin Bailey.
PuckPedia has a handy sortable list of the 84 players around the league who did not receive qualifying offers by Tuesday's deadline — an average of nearly three players per team, so the Canucks were right in that ballpark.
Only 10 players on that list had cap hits of more than $1 million last season. Chicago's Dylan Strome and Dominik Kubalik were both in the $3 million range, and Brendan Lemieux of Los Angeles sits third at $1.55 million.
In terms of production, the top players on the list are Strome (48 points), Montreal's Rem Pitlick (37 points) and Langley native Danton Heinen, who picked up 33 points in Pittsburgh last season.
As thorough as they've been, it looks like PuckPedia is missing at least one team on its list: the Detroit Red Wings. They declined to qualify four players, including one-time Canuck Olli Juolevi.
So Noah Juulsen is the only remaining asset from the Juolevi/Lammikko trade, and he has re-upped for another year with the organization.
Highmore-for-Gaudette is also a wash, as Adam Gaudette was not qualified by Ottawa.
For now, Vancouver is sitting on the right side of the 2019 Linus Karlsson-for-Jonathan Dahlen deal. Dahlen was not qualified by San Jose after an inconsistent season that saw him start well but go through a number of injuries and even some healthy scratches before season's end. Karlsson, now 22, is at development camp this week following his breakout season in Sweden, where his 26 goals and 46 points earned him rookie of the year honours in the SHL.
After signing a two-year, two-way contract with Vancouver in late May, Karlsson was "the Swede who stood out the most on the opening day of development camp," on Monday,
according to MacIntyre.
He is older and more experienced than many of the players on the ice at UBC, but this week is another step toward getting him to Penticton for the Young Stars tournament, and then on to main camp in the fall — some centre depth for the organization, even if he'll most likely start the season in Abbotsford.
And after swearing that they wouldn't put on their skates again when they returned to the Canucks as special advisors to the general manager last June, there were Daniel and Henrik Sedin on the ice on Monday, saucing passes and offering advice to the prospects along with the rest of the revamped development staff.
Back to free agency and cap space: MacIntyre calculates that the Canucks have just over $6 million in available cap space for next season as they head into Wednesday, barring any trades but including the $3.5 million cap hit for Micheal Ferland which will be re-assigned to long-term injured reserve.
And again, barring any NHL-level trades, the roster is pretty close to complete even without Highmore and Lammikko, with 21 of 23 roster spots filled on the
CapFriendly chart if we assume that Nils Hoglander and Tucker Poolman will be healthy and ready to return to action in the fall.
Those numbers include Andrei Kuzmenko added to the forward group, and Jack Rathbone on the back end. Justin Dowling is also signed for one more year and is included among the forwards, and would be the most obvious player to be bumped down if Allvin and Rutherford are able to be successful with their shopping spree on Wednesday.
As far as trades go, Rutherford downplayed the immediate possibility in his conversation with MacIntyre.
On Monday's edition of the '32 Thoughts' podcast, Elliotte Friedman offered an update on the J.T. Miller situation, after it was rumoured that a possible deal with the New York Islanders was kiboshed on draft day because Vancouver management would not allow Lou Lamoriello's crew to speak with Miller's representatives about what they're looking for on Miller's next contract.
These tweets from former Islanders' PR chief Chris Botta lit the fuse on that conversation.
On Monday's podcast, Friedman confirmed that the Canucks weren't letting teams talk to Miller's agent — but said that could change in the future. He also mentioned that sometimes, when these types of situations arise, clubs are given a specific window in which to have these conversations, and that sometimes agents don't want to engage because it's not a preferred destination for their player.
In this case, I wonder if the issue is still that the Canucks remain open to re-signing Miller? If they give his people a chance to see what kind of deals might be out there for him, does that diminish Vancouver's negotiating leverage on a contract?
We'll see what happens from here. But my read is that if Vancouver does grant a team permission to talk with Miller's agent, that would most likely indicate that they've resigned themselves to that fact that he won't sign an extension and will need to be moved at some point.
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