Though July 1 is traditionally one of the craziest days of the year on the hockey calendar, 2022 marks the third year that hockey fans have celebrated Canada Day without a Free Agent Frenzy to keep them occupied.
The Vancouver Canucks did their level best to singlehandedly fill that void on Friday, with three separate news drops over the course of the day.
Let's start at the end, with the announcement that the club has come to terms with Brock Boeser on a new three-year deal. The cap hit is $6.65 million per season — less than the $7.5 million qualifying offer that he would have been due on July 13, but probably more than he would have gotten if the club had elected to file for arbitration on Saturday — a negotiating tool that could have knocked down their cost, but would likely have resulted in a shorter term and put the player and his club at odds with each other.
The bottom line here: Boeser is comfortable in Vancouver and wanted to stay. And the organization wanted to keep him.
"We wanted to keep Brock, and Brock is a big part of this franchise moving forward," said general manager Patrik Allvin on a Zoom call late Friday afternoon. "Twenty-five years old, obviously went through a really tough time last year and we believe that he is capable of being a better player moving forward here. So it was a commitment from from both sides to get this deal done."
According to
Thomas Drance at The Athletic, the Canucks did make a significant move on money on Friday, in order to get the deal done. In exchange, the club got the three-year term it sought — buying one year of unrestricted free agency and providing some cost certainty over the next three seasons. And the structure of the deal is flat — no signing bonuses and, according to
CapFriendly, only a 10-team no-trade list in the last year of the deal — the first one where Boeser is eligible for trade protection.
So this contract resolution does not rule out the possibility of a trade at some point, especially within the next two seasons. But when
Iain MacIntyre of Sportsnet tracked down Bruce Boudreau on Friday, the coach certainly sounded like Boeser is a key part of his planning for next season.
“I'm really happy for Brock,” Boudreau told Sportsnet. “I'm really happy that this isn't hanging over his head anymore. And I'm really happy for us. We all know that he's got the capability of being a great player. And I think last year has to be an anomaly. A lot of great players go through that one-year anomaly. He had a reason (with his dad’s declining health), but still.
“I would think that he'll be so hungry to play now that you'll see the Brock Boeser of two years ago and three years ago. I know he's probably really excited about signing the deal, and I know he wanted to come back to us. We want guys that want to be here, and I know he wanted to be here.”
Boeser was also actively involved in the changes to his coaching staff, which were announced earlier on Friday morning. Though Brad Shaw was under contract as an assistant for another year, the Canucks did not stand in the way of Shaw re-joining his old partner in crime John Tortorella in Philadelphia, where Drance reports that he's getting a four-year deal that matches Torts' term, and a higher-level title as associate coach.
In a trade of sorts, Boudreau gets Mike Yeo as his new top assistant. At 48, Yeo is 10 years younger than Shaw. He started his coaching career in the Pittsburgh organization, and his time in that organization overlapped with Allvin's time as a European scout and with Derek Clancey's time as a pro scout. In 2011, Yeo got his first head-coaching job with the Minnesota Wild — and was eventually replaced by Boudreau after he was fired in 2016, with a 27-game interim stint from John Torchetti in between.
Yeo moved on to St. Louis as an assistant — and was promoted to the head job after Ken Hitchcock was fired. After he was let go by the Blues in November of 2018, he landed as an assistant on Alain Vigneault's staff in Philadelphia at the beginning of the 2019-20 season. He lasted there until the end of this year, serving as interim head coach after Vigneault was fired in December.
Despite their dismal record this season, the Flyers were happy with the job that Yeo did under trying circumstances this year, and general manager Chuck Fletcher indicated that he'd be open to keeping Yeo in the organization in some capacity. That may have changed when Torts came on board, but MacIntyre reports that Yeo was Boudreau's first choice all along to replace Scott Walker.
"First of all, we talked to an awful lot of people," Boudreau told MacIntyre. "It kept coming back to Mike. This guy is a great communicator and he is very hockey knowledgeable. And he's done everything. I just thought he would be a perfect fit for me to, you know, help coach me.
"I want a high-energy, high-positivity coaching staff, and a staff that's going to be really together. And I think that's what we're getting with him."
Yeo did a good job of keeping the mood as positive as possible while injuries and other circumstances derailed the Flyers last season. He also checks the box that Jim Rutherford laid out for Vancouver at the end of last year, as a coach who has a technical, detail-oriented approach.
Yeo's expected to to assist on all aspects of the team. After five years as the head coach of the AHL affiliate, Trent Cull has also been promoted to the big club as an assistant who's expected to run the defense and, likely, the penalty kill. Jason King stays on, and remains in charge of the power play after Vancouver finished ninth overall with a 23.5% efficiency rate last season.
The organization made an intriguing hire to fill Cull's spot with Abbotsford — former Chicago Blackhawks head coach Jeremy Colliton.
Still just 37, Colliton quickly made his name in coaching in Sweden, where he finished out his playing career.
There is a three-season gap between Colliton leaving Mora in 2017 to sign on with the Rockford IceHogs and Johan Hedberg taking over in 2020. In Colliton's one full AHL season with Rockford in 2017-18, he guided the team to a record of 40-28-4-4 and the longest playoff run in franchise history, where the IceHogs fell in six games in the third round to the Texas Stars.
Colliton becomes just the third head coach in the history of the Utica Comets/Abbotsford Canucks, following Cull and Travis Green. So far, the organization has only made it past the first round of the playoffs in one season, when it rode Jacob Markstrom to the Calder Cup Final before falling to the Manchester Monarchs in 2015.
That leads back to Friday's first announcement from Vancouver: new two-way contracts for Will Lockwood and Noah Juulsen, and a two-year, one-way deal for defenseman Jack Rathbone.
Juulsen, 25, will need to clear waivers to be assigned to Abbotsford for another season in his hometown. According to CapFriendly, his deal is for $750,000 at the NHL level and $250,000 at the AHL level.
Lockwood, 24, remains waiver exempt for one more season. His deal is for $750,000 at the NHL level and $125,000 in the AHL.
And Rathbone, 23, is also waiver exempt for one more season. He'll make the same money whether he plays in Vancouver or Abbotsford, but the one-way deal is a signal that the organization is hopeful that he'll be able to grab a spot in the top six with the big club next season. He's a lefty, so that should put him in the mix with Quinn Hughes and Oliver Ekman-Larsson. Travis Dermott and Kyle Burroughs are also both under contract for next season, but are listed on CapFriendly as being able to play either side.
Rathbone's contract is also structured with a cap hit of $850,000, but a real salary of $750,000 in 2022-23 and $950,000 in 2023-24. That gives him a somewhat higher jumping-off point for his qualifying offer when he becomes a restricted free agent at age 25, at the end of this deal.
So after a busy day, the Canucks now have just three restricted free agents left to address this offseason. Juho Lammikko, Matthew Highmore and Justin Bailey all have arbitration rights, so we'll see what happens with them.
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