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Covid causes cancellation after Canucks lock up Demko for 5 years |
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Wednesday was a uniquely Canucks kind of day.
Everything progressed as usual in the morning, with all expected players except Adam Gaudette present and accounted for at the morning skate.
Then, shortly after lunch, news broke that the Canucks had inked Thatcher Demko to a five-year contract extension worth $25 million.
Lately, most of the talk around team contracts has been about Ian Clark, Travis Green and Tanner Pearson. At the beginning of the season, it was all about Elias Pettersson and Quinn Hughes.
We've mused a bit on Demko's status over the last month or so, as his performance has confirmed that Bubble Demko was no fluke and that he could realistically be on his way to becoming one of the best goalies in the league.
But there were no whispers at all that talks were underway between the Canucks and Demko's reps. I quite enjoyed the fact that the news dropped out of nowhere.
Demko, of course, was the third player selected by the Canucks in Jim Benning's first draft — taken 36th overall in 2014. At the time, he'd just finished his freshman year at Boston College.
The club has followed the patient, old-school approach with his development, allowing him two more years in college, then two-and-a-half seasons with the Utica Comets before he was moved into the backup position behind Markstrom midway through the 2018-19 season.
When the Canucks let Markstrom go to free agency, they gambled that they could get this outcome from Demko — and were well aware that if they kept both goalies, they'd have to expose one in the expansion draft. Given his full no-movement clause with the Flames, I imagine Markstrom was asking for the same from Vancouver — and that may ultimately have been an even bigger sticking point in negotiations than the ask of six years at $6 million.
Now, Vancouver has locked up a netminder who is six years younger, for his prime years. Demko turns 26 in December, so he'll be 30 when the deal expires.
It's a tidy piece of business.
It also locks up the Vancouver RFA who was closest to reaching unrestricted status. Demko could have tested the open market in two years, at the end of the 2022-23 season. The contract buys three of his free-agent years.
As for how it impacts the future deals of Elias Pettersson and Quinn Hughes — that remains to be seen. We know that the flat cap situation currently has the Canucks with limited flexibility regarding next season's salary structure. Benning can do his best to use the trade deadline, the expansion draft and the offseason to try to make more room, but that won't be easy when nearly every other team in the league has the same objective.
I do think, though, that it's a very positive sign that ownership was willing to sign off on a significant, long-term deal at this time. I believe that's the first significant expenditure that the club has made since the beginning of the pandemic — and there has been lots of discussion about how the free-agent exodus during the last offseason may have been triggered, at least in part, by a lack of willingness to spend real dollars during a time when hockey revenues have cratered.
But all those good vibes barely had time to take hold before the sudden announcement that Wednesday night's game between the Canucks and the Calgary Flames had been postponed due to Covid issues.
Here's the official announcement from the league:
It looked like we were all clear when the daily Covid Protocol list was released in the afternoon, and only Adam Gaudette's name was on it. But test results come in when they come in — and it was after the daily deadline that Vancouver got word that another player and a member of the coaching staff had also returned positive tests.
Both teams, plus the broadcast crew and some journalists, were at the rink when the announcement of the cancellation came down, about 90 minutes before the game's scheduled 7:30 p.m. start time.
On the Sportsnet broadcast, Dan Murphy confirmed that Adam Gaudette's second test did come back positive, so he is now officially a positive case.
I would assume that second tests are now being carried out on the new additions to the list, to make sure they aren't false positives — still possible until we hear otherwise.
Meanwhile, the rest of the team and staff will go through the regular daily testing, and I imagine contact tracing is underway. I know when the Flyers were shut down, everyone was required to drive to the rink each morning, get tested, then go home.
More information is expected to be released on Thursday. In the meantime, this tweet from Pierre LeBrun offers a bit of hope to hold onto.
Thursday was supposed to be a day off, then the Canucks were scheduled to fly to Edmonton on Friday to face the Oilers on Saturday, followed by the Jets in Winnnipeg on Sunday. Right now, that's all in doubt.
Meanwhile, the Flames also caught a bit of a bad break, having come out to Vancouver for a one-off before playing in Edmonton on Friday, then hosting Toronto on Sunday.
I'm so disappointed that we'll never get to see what would have been that perfect head-to-head matchup between the dead-even Canucks and Flames, Markstrom vs. Demko on same day that Demko signed his new deal. That moment is lost forever.
But mostly, I'm crossing my fingers that this next batch of test results comes out as well as we can hope for, and that the Canucks' shutdown is as brief as is safely possible.
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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