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The Vancouver Canucks sign defenseman Danny DeKeyser to a PTO |
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PTO season is officially upon us.
The Vancouver Canucks were one of five teams that inked players to professional tryout contracts on Friday, making a deal to bring left-shot defenseman Danny DeKeyser into camp.
These are the other four PTO deals that were announced:
• Calvin de Haan - D - Carolina
• Nikolas Brouillard - D - Anaheim
• Nathan Beaulieu - D - Anaheim
• Zach Aston-Reese - F - Toronto
Brouillard is a name that was unfamiliar to me. Also a lefty, he's a 27-year-old who played Canadian university hockey at McGill after one pro season spent mostly in the ECHL. He has been in the Anaheim organization with the AHL San Diego Gulls for the past two seasons. Good for him for getting an NHL shot!
DeKeyser is a 32-year-old from Detroit, who has played his entire NHL career with the Red Wings. Undrafted, he was signed out of Western Michigan University after his junior year in 2013. Other than six playoff games with AHL Grand Rapids in 2013 — where he won a Calder Cup — he has played his entire pro career in the NHL. He has put up 33 goals and 146 points in 547 games over 10 seasons, and has 266 career penalty minutes.
Listed at 6'3" and 190 pounds, DeKeyser isn't a big hitter. But he is a committed shot blocker — with 102 blocks in 59 games last season — and has been a fixture on Detroit's penalty kill for years.
DeKeyser has been a UFA for the first time in his career this summer. He just came off a six-year deal that he signed in Detroit in the summer of 2016, after filing for salary arbitration. The deal carried a cap hit of $5 million per season.
But injuries have been a big part of DeKeyser's story, especially in recent years. He played just eight games in the 2019-20 season before having back surgery that December, and struggled to regain his strength after he returned. With that big cap hit, the Red Wings placed him on waivers for the first time in February of 2021, though he ended up playing 47 of 56 games in the shortened 2020-21 season. Last year, he missed four games in December due to Covid protocols and 10 games in March with an undisclosed injury, as well as being healthy scratched nine times during the year.
Given everything else that has happened in the world since his surgery in December of 2019, it is possible that DeKeyser has finally been able to go through a proper summer of training and rehab over the last four months, and will look more like his old self. We'll see if he can prove himself as a useful option when training camp opens in two weeks' time.
Despite the Canucks' lack of depth on the right side of their blue line, DeKeyser plays on the left. And those days of multi-million-dollar cap hits will certainly be behind him. If he does earn a contract, it will likely be close to the league minimum and under $1 million — low enough to ensure that he wouldn't risk getting cut or sent to the minors because there's a better option available from a salary-cap perspective.
Speaking with Rick Dhaliwal on Friday, Jim Rutherford laid out multiple options for how the Canucks might be able to address the shortfall on the right side with their existing personnel, even suggesting that Quinn Hughes could be an option to switch over.
I haven't gone back in the archives, but my recollection is that Hughes had played both sides before suiting up for Team USA at the World Championship in Denmark in 2018, a month before he was drafted by the Canucks. So — maybe not a completely crazy idea?
Rutherford has also left the door open for other possible PTO signings — including the determined Alex Chiasson, whose refusal to leave town may yet pay off for him.
Dhaliwal also tweeted out a juicy quote from Bruce Boudreau about Andrei Kuzmenko, who is apparently going to get a lot of opportunity to show his stuff through preseason.
Boudreau also told Dhaliwal that one of his goals with his first training camp is to have his team ready to go immediately — both in camp, and at the beginning of the season.
It's ironic — the Canucks actually got off to one of their better starts last year before the bottom fell out. They went 3-2-1 on their season-opening road trip before following that up with the 5-13-1 stretch that got Travis Green and Jim Benning dismissed.
Considering that the Canucks only had one regular season with a record over .500 during Green's tenure (2019-20), their records through the first 10 games of each season were actually pretty decent:
2020-21: 5-5-0 (but 2-5-0 in first seven games)
2019-20: 6-3-1 (but lost first two games)
2018-19: 6-4-0 (but went 1-2- in first three games)
2017-18: 6-3-1
Let's see how that compares to Boudreau's recent work — as a coach who's known for delivering strong regular-season results:
2019-20 - Minnesota: 3-7-0 (lost first four games - fired in Feb. 2020)
2018-19 - Minnesota: 6-2-2
2017-18 - Minnesota: 4-4-2
2016-17 - Minnesota: 6-3-1
2015-16 - Anaheim: 1-7-2 (fired at season's end)
2014-15 - Anaheim: 8-2-0
That certainly explains why Boudreau thinks good starts are important. The two times in this sample that his team came out of the gate below .500, he lost his job not long afterward.
With a contract that only runs until the end of this season, Boudreau has plenty of personal incentive to get his group rolling well as soon as the puck drops for 2022-23.
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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