Jim Benning accomplished the seemingly impossible on Friday, sweeping the contracts of Loui Eriksson, Jay Beagle and Antoine Roussel off the Vancouver Canucks' books with one stroke of his pen.
He also acquired a coveted top-six winger with upside, and a star defenseman.
And yet — the end result is still a mixed bag. Benning had to surrender significant assets, including his 2021 first-round draft pick, to make the deal happen. And plenty of questions remain about how well Oliver Ekman-Larsson will perform as a Canuck under the remaining six years of his contract with the $8.25 million cap hit, even if the Arizona Coyotes are retaining 12 percent or $990,000 per season.
If you missed it, here are the full details of the trade:
Vancouver gets Ekman Larsson, 30, and winger Conor Garland, 25, from the Coyotes.
Arizona gets Eriksson, Roussel and Beagle. Also, Vancouver's 2021 first-rounder from Friday — the ninth overall pick, which the Coyotes used to pick Edmonton sniper Dylan Guenther — as well as a second-rounder in 2022 and a seventh-rounder in 2023.
The three departing Canucks are all in the last year of their deals. Total cap hit out: $12 million.
That's replaced by $7.26 million for OEL, who becomes the Canucks' highest-paid player, for now. (More on that in a minute). Garland, like Jason Dickinson, is an RFA with arbitration rights.
We can argue all day about whether or not Ekman-Larsson will bounce back after some rough years in the desert. I think the best course of action is to wait and see.
Drafted sixth overall in 2009, the year the Canucks took Jordan Schroeder at No. 22, Ekman-Larsson has 769 career NHL games under his belt, with 128 goals and 260 assists for 388 points. That ranks him 10th in his draft class, just ahead of Reilly Smith, and third among defensemen behind Victor Hedman (518 points in 816 games) and Tyson Barrie (394 points in 610 games).
Ekman-Larsson can be productive offensively. Between 2013 and 2019, he put up six straight seasons with 10 goals or more, peaking at 23 in 2014-15. The Canucks have only had one defenseman in their franchise history hit that mark — Adrian Aucoin, who defied the dead-puck era and the Canucks' grim 58-point season with 23 goals in 1998-99.
And while he has traditionally been durable, Ekman-Larsson missed 10 games early last season with a lower-body injury, finishing the year with 24 points in 46 games while averaging 20:58 per game. That's his lowest average ice time since his rookie season, as the Coyotes leaned harder on emerging Jakob Chychrun, the 23-year-old who hit a career high with 41 points while averaging 23:23.
And while I was surprised to hear that Alex Edler is choosing to test the free-agent market for the first time in his career after the Sedins have come back to the Canucks' management group, I do think that Daniel and Henrik can have a positive impact on OEL.
Ekman Larsson has also played with Elias Pettersson at two World Championships. The pair won gold in 2018, when Petey suffered that thumb injury during round-robin play, and were eliminated in overtime by Finland in the quarterfinal in 2019, when OEL served as Sweden's captain.
As for Garland, he's a very nice addition to this package, and came off well when he chatted with the local media on Friday afternoon, after the trade.
Originally drafted in the fifth round in 2015, Garland has tenaciously worked his way up the Coyotes' depth chart. He established himself as a full-time roster player in 2019-20, with 22 goals and 39 points in 68 games. Last season, he dropped to 12 goals but still matched that 39 points in just 49 games.
Garland missed one game in late February with a lower-body injury, and six games with a knee injury late in the season. But he was healthy enough to head to Latvia for the World Championship, where he suited up for Team USA for the first time in his career. He was named to the tournament all-star team as he won a bronze medal while finishing second in tournament scoring with six goals and 13 points in 10 games.
As a Massachusetts kid, Garland already knows Jack Rathbone well. In the video above, he tells a good story about how a young Rathbone awed him the first time he ever saw him skate.
Garland's undersized for the NHL, but his tenacity has gotten him where he is today. He likes to go to the dirty areas — I think of him sort of like a more talented Tyler Motte, although he doesn't kill penalties. Perhaps he could also be compared to a slighter Nils Hoglander?
With Friday's big deal complete, the Canucks are now sitting with nearly $18.8 million in cap space, according to
CapFriendly. Seems like a lot, but that's with both Garland and Dickinson still to be signed, as well as Elias Pettersson and Quinn Hughes.
The agents at CAA now have a couple of comparables to work with for Hughes, after Miro Heiskanen signed an eight-year deal with a cap hit of $8.45 million before last week's trade freeze. On Saturday morning, Cale Makar also re-upped with the Avalanche, reportedly for six years at $9 million.
After being left on the outside a little bit as Jack and Luke Hughes celebrated their youngest brother's selection by the New Jersey Devils on Friday, Quinn will get the last laugh when he gets his payday.
And while there have been some paranoid rumours circulating that a bold team might sign Elias Pettersson to an offer sheet when the market opens next Wednesday, the well-connected Darren Dreger pooh-poohed that idea on the most recent episode of the 'Ray and Dregs Podcast.' He mentioned that negotiations on Petey's deal were well down the road with CAA, and that even if something like that did happen, the Canucks could match.
Now, they have the cap space to easily do so. And my guess is that they won't use any space on deals for players like Dickinson or Garland until they have Petey's deal in place — just in case. Dreger's reporting also reminds me that no offer sheet gets signed unless the player and the agent decide to do so. Sounds like that's not what's happening here.
Also, more cap space can still potentially be cleared by Benning. He still has trade chips Nate Schmidt and Braden Holtby on the market — and insisted earlier this week that the buzz around Schmidt is more about teams who are inquiring than about the Canucks wanting to move him.
Buyouts are also still a possibility, especially with Jake Virtanen. That window remains open for a few more days, until July 27.
Now — a quick word about the draft, which has ended up taking second place to everything else going on around the Canucks.
I was so disappointed that they parted with that ninth pick, after all the talk of the tier of nine good players in this draft, and how that group was believed to have been well scouted.
But as the draft order was revealed, my disappointment eased pretty quickly — as soon as I saw Mason McTavish go third, pretty much. Then Kent Johnson was gone at five, Simon Edvinsson at six, William Eklund at seven. By the time the Coyotes took Guenther at No. 9, I was pretty much at peace.
As I type this on Saturday morning, the Canucks have made their second-round pick at No. 41, a relatively daring selection of winger Danila Klimovich out of Belarus.
Listed as the No. 19 European skater by NHL Central Scouting, Klimovich is a big body at 6'2" and 202 pounds. Relatively unknown heading into U18s, he vaulted himself onto the world stage with six goals in five games. And though he just turned 18 in January, he also played three games for Belarus at the World Championship, where he was held pointless.
He's a bit of an enigma. I'm seeing some talk that he could come over to the QMJHL to continue his development next season, where he's property of the Rouyn-Noranda Huskies.
I'll have more on the draft in the next blog — assuming I don't have another blockbuster trade to break down. With their third-rounder now belonging to Dallas from the Jason Dickinson deal and the fourth-rounder with Detroit from the Madison Bowey trade-deadline exchange, the Canucks won't pick again for awhile. At this point, they still have two picks in the fifth round, two in the sixth and one in the seventh.
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