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It's really happening! Canucks are fired up, looking good on Day 1 of camp |
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It's all starting to feel quite real, isn't it?
In 24 NHL cities, players hit the ice on Monday for their first formal day of training camp, ahead of the games that are scheduled to start next month in Edmonton and Toronto.
I believe most, if not all, markets allowed media members into the building. In Vancouver, that meant a separate entrance — up on the Georgia Viaduct level — and watching practice from up in the 300-level seats while keeping safe social distance.
The team practiced in two groups — basically, the main roster and the Black Aces.
All pretty familiar.
In TV, when they split a show's run into two segments, they use the term 'mid-season finale' to designate a cliffhanger before a multi-month hiatus begins. That's basically what happened to hockey season this year.
The Canucks' mid-season finale was a 5-4 shootout win over the New York Islanders on March 10 — an entertaining back-and-forth affair that saw Thatcher Demko face 49 shots from the Islanders and J.T. Miller score the shootout winner. Jacob Markstrom and Jay Beagle were out of the lineup with injuries. The healthy scratches were Jordie Benn and Loui Eriksson — who missed his first game since drawing back into the lineup after Josh Leivo was injured in December. Eriksson came out of the lineup against the Islanders in order to make room for Brock Boeser, who came back after a month out of the lineup with a rib cartilage fracture.
By all reports, Boeser was flying on the ice on Monday — and looked strong when he joined Elias Pettersson for his Zoom call with the media after practice.
I thought Brock's body language was interesting when he was asked about his offseason training and how he's feeling. Just before the 7:30 mark of the video, he moves out of the defensive crossed-arms that he maintained for most of the interview, into a more aggressive elbow-forward stance while saying that he's feeling really good after the training that he was able to do this summer.
Also — something we don't see every day. Boeser was pretty fired up at about the 3:00 mark, when he was asked about his name coming up in trade speculation from Matt Sekeres of TSN1040 at the end of last week.
Boeser said that he received assurance from Jim Benning that his name's not on the block and pointed out — correctly, in my opinion — that the timing of this conversation is "questionable," with training camps about to open and rosters for playoff teams frozen until after they're eliminated from the playoffs.
As I've said before, the flat cap will create challenges not just for the Canucks, but also for many other teams. Boeser's current contract is one of many bridge deals around the league that were signed last summer with big base salaries in the final year — aiming to guarantee substantial qualifying offers for those players on their next deals.
Boeser's final-year base salary in 2021-22 is $7.5 million. Charlie McAvoy's is $7.3 million in Boston. Zach Werenski's is $7 million in Columbus. Matthew Tkachuk's is $9 million in Calgary!
I think you see where I'm going with this: those bridge deals were signed last summer with a goal of keeping costs down in the short term, but making sure that emerging stars would be paid handsomely the next time they hit restricted free agency. At the time, the assumption was that the salary cap would rise significantly in the next three years — especially when the money from the new U.S. TV deal and from the affluent new fanbase in Seattle starts to roll in at the beginning of the 2021-22 season.
If the cap stays flat or flat-ish for the next two or three seasons as the league works to get its revenue streams flowing again post-pandemic, teams will have a tougher time paying the piper when new deals are due than they originally expected. And in the case of the Canucks, they'll have to find money to ink Elias Pettersson and Quinn Hughes to second contracts that could be high-end before Boeser's next deal is due.
Add in the fact that Tyler Toffoli jumped seamlessly into Boeser's lineup spot when he was acquired, and the Canucks seem like they'll try to re-sign him, and it's understandable why people see Boeser as a possible trade chip.
The good news for the Canucks is that they currently have almost a clean slate for Boeser's next contract year. The only contracts on the books that currently run past the end of the 2021-22 season are Bo Horvat and J.T. Miller up front (both expire in 2022-23) and Tyler Myers on the back end (expires in 2023-24).
Anyway — Boeser's right. With actual practices happening now and actual games just a couple of weeks away, now's not the time to be freaking out about trades and cap relief.
The other big news on Monday was the absence of Micheal Ferland — who skated last week with the non-quarantine group in Phase 2 but who was deemed "unfit to play" on Day 1 of training camp.
Is it Covid? Is it a return of concussion symptoms? Is it something else? We don't know.
In an effort to protect players' privacy on a sensitive medical issue like Covid-19, this is the language we'll be hearing from teams regarding injuries and illnesses for the foreseeable future.
"You guys are gonna have to get used to this 'not fit to play' policy that the league and Players' Association agreed upon," Benning said during his media availability on Zoom on Monday. "We can't give the reasons why, but he wasn't fit to be out there today."
When pressed, though, Benning did add one more somewhat cryptic detail.
"He’ll be back at some point," Benning said about Ferland. "It’s more safety than anything else, but I can't expand on that."
When I hear 'safety,' I wonder if this is something like the 'secondary exposure' that led the Pittsburgh Penguins to keep nine players off the ice on Monday — players who had contact with another person who had contact with someone who tested positive. It's pure speculation, but that's all we have for now.
I do wonder if we'll continue to hear more players' after-the-fact reports of positive cases and what that meant, like Auston Matthews offered up in Toronto on Monday. Good on him for addressing his situation head on after his name had swirled through the rumour mill over the last few weeks.
Travis Green was also downright jovial in his media availability, smiling and cracking jokes while also praising his players for how well they performed on the ice for what was basically the same tough session that they endured during the first day of 'normal' camp in Victoria last September — bag skate and all.
"Oh, that was a pretty normal Day 1," chuckled Brandon Sutter. "Since Greener's been here, we haven't really had an easy Day 1, 2 or 3 at training camp, so we didn't expect that to change.
"I'm pretty sure today's skate was the exact same skate we had back on September 14th or whatever, so that felt just as awful as it usually does. But all in all, guys are pretty good. Sometimes you get through the first day feeling okay. Sometimes you don't feel good. I thought today, everyone looked pretty sharp, so I was pretty happy with the way it went."
The routine may have been the same, but the vibe *was* different.
"I think it's actually kind of kind of unique because it was just the guys that have been together all year, just the guys the team on the ice," Sutter continued. "Usually at training camp, we're split into three groups and you're kind of intermixed with a bunch of other guys. I thought it was kind of nice to have just the group of guys that are here. It felt more like just our team, right from the get-go."
Another difference is that instead of having just three or four days before exhbition games begin, this camp will run for nearly two weeks before the teams travel to their hub cities. They'll play just one warm-up game against a to-be-determined opponent before things start to count. Green says he plans to incorporate a lot of scrimmaging into his practices to start bumping guys toward being game ready — possibly, starting as early as Tuesday.
I'll close today with this nice little montage of Day 1's events.
There's still a long way for the NHL to go to get to the finish line, but if you ignore the fact that it was mid-July, for the most part, I thought Monday felt reassuringly normal.
Let's go!
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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