And then there were two.
Just Elias Pettersson and Quinn Hughes are left to be signed to new contracts after the Vancouver Canucks agreed to terms with Jason Dickinson on a three-year deal on Saturday.
The contract carries an average annual value of $2.65 million per season.
When I was looking at comparables for Dickinson
a couple of weeks ago, my starting point was four years at $2.5 million, which put him in the same ballpark as players like Ivan Barbashev and Oskar Sundqvist of St. Louis, and Teddy Blueger of Pittsburgh.
Barbashev and Blueger both signed new deals in July for a little less money, but only two years of term. Sundqvist took four years at $2.75 million back in 2019. So, Dickinson's deal falls right in that ballpark.
With that contract on the books, a glance at the Canucks' team page on
CapFriendly looks alarming at first, showing just $10.6 million in available cap space for Petey and Hughes.
But that number is also based on 24 contracts on the books. Jack Rathbone can most easily be sent to Abbotsford — without needing to clear waivers. That takes $925,000 off the cap. Then, let's put two of the three $750,000 forwards on waivers, whether that's Justin Bailey, Phil Di Giuseppe or Justin Dowling.
All told, that adds up to $2.425 in additional cap space, getting us to $13.089 million. Add $3.5 million in LTIR for Micheal Ferland, and the team still has about $16.6 million to play with.
Even with the recent escalation in salaries for defensemen, that's enough to get something done for both players, but probably not over the long term.
Quinn Hughes' best comparables are Cale Makar and Miro Heiskanen. Heiskanen's only three months older than Hughes, but he was drafted a year earlier and, thus, has 76 more games on his resume. Despite that, it's Hughes who has more points — 97, compared to 95 for Heiskanen.
Some might argue that Heiskanen is a better all-round defender, but point production counts for a lot in contact negotiations. Heiskanen signed in July for eight years at an AAV of $8.45 million.
Then, there's Makar — nearly a full year older than Hughes and also drafted a year earlier. Their paths were similar, joining the NHL at the same time, after two years of college. And while Makar has a Calder Trophy from his rookie season and was runner-up for the Norris last year, he has had injury issues which have limited him to just 101 regular-season games over two years, while Hughes has played 129.
With 94 points, Makar's points per game is the highest of the three. He also has 31 points in 35 career playoff games, although Hughes' 16 in 17 from last year is not too shabby, either. Heiskanen has 30 in 40.
Makar's new deal, signed on July 24, carries a cap hit of $9 million over the next six seasons.
While these three have quickly made big impacts early in their NHL careers, their salaries aren't out of line with some other top-end defensemen who have signed long-term deals in recent years. Take Thomas Chabot of Ottawa, who came out of his entry-level deal in 2020-21 with an eight-year contract with an $8 million cap hit. Or Aaron Ekblad's eight-year second contract, which took effect at the beginning of the 2017-18 season and carries a cap hit of $7.5 million.
As for Pettersson, the comparable that's most commonly cited for him is Mat Barzal.
Drafted in 2015, Barzal exploded out of the gate with 85 points in his rookie year, beating out Brock Boeser for the Calder Trophy. Now through four seasons, he has 252 points in 289 regular-season games and, knock on wood, a pristine health record.
As an RFA, he signed a three-year bridge deal in January, with a cap hit of $7 million.
Pettersson, of course, also has a Calder Trophy. And with 153 points in 165 regular-season games to date, his rate of production is similar.
But as much as I dislike the narrative that Pettersson is injury prone, he has been sidelined much more than Barzal — missing more than half of last season (30 games) with that wrist injury, as well as a total of 11 games in his rookie season due to a concussion in October and a sprained knee in January. To his credit, he missed just one game in the 2019-20 season, with a lower-body injury in February of that year.
I appreciate the fact that both the Canucks and the agency handling Pettersson and Hughes' negotiations, CAA, continue to try to reassure the fanbase that there's nothing to worry about.
"There’s no holdup,"
agent Pat Brisson told Patrick Johnston of The Province earlier this week. "It’s a process.
"It’s Aug. 12. If there were a deadline tomorrow, I’m sure we would be talking 10 hours a day. So I don’t get too emotional with it. I go with the process.
"You look around, a lot of these deals are done during camp. But this isn’t our goal; our goal is to get it done. There’s no animosity."
It's not like Brisson and his partner J.P. Barry can be working on Pettersson and Hughes 24/7, either. Their big deals this offseason were engineering the Seth Jones trade and extension and Dougie Hamilton's big free-agency deal with New Jersey, where they'd been given permission to shop their client around before July 28.
Barzal, by the way, is also a CAA client.
And the Canucks have been busy with other business this week, taking care of Dickinson as well as Olli Juolevi and Guillaume Brisebois.
Dickinson is repped by Pat Morris, whose client list also includes Bo Horvat after his previous rep, Mark Guy, left the business earlier this year. Juolevi is repped by Markus Lehto, whose client list is heavy on Finnish players.
PuckPedia, which is pretty thorough about listing players' agents, does not have one on the books for Brisebois.
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