The Vancouver Canucks’ Salary Cap Woes May Spoil Their Rebuild
If this summer’s scheduled NHL Return To Play is able to take place as anticipated, fans of the Vancouver Canucks will be treated to something they have not experienced since 2015- playoff hockey. The Canucks will participate in the play-in round against the Minnesota Wild, with a lineup featuring two budding young superstars in the league- forward Elias Pettersson and defenseman Quinn Hughes. Their future is bright- or rather, it would be, if it were not for the team’s wealth of bad contracts that will pose increasing difficulty for this team in the years to come.
Many Canucks fans place the blame for this precarious situation on general manager Jim Benning. In his previous position, Benning had ironically helped build the Boston Bruins team that defeated the Canucks in the 2011 Stanley Cup Finals, serving as their assistant general manager. Benning joined the Canucks in 2014, with a mandate from ownership to extend a long stretch of playoff contention. During that stretch, the Canucks had been anchored by a pair of superstar twins, Daniel and Henrik Sedin, who had led the Cancucks to back to back President’s Trophy titles (awarded to the NHL’s best regular season team), as well as the 2011 Western Conference championship.
But by the time Benning arrived, it was clear that the Canucks’ run could not continue much longer- with the Sedins now in their mid-thirties and with only a few years left in their careers. But Canucks ownership insisted on keeping the competitive streak going, pressuring Benning to sign veteran players to expensive, questionable deals that ate up much of the team’s salary cap.
The ur example of this type of signing was the contract awarded to Loui Eriksson during the 2016 offseason. The left winger seemed to have the ideal track record- he was coming off of a season where he had scored thirty goals and sixty-three points with the Boston Bruins, and he had performed well with the Sedins on Team Sweden in international play. But even so, Benning’s contract offer of six years, $36 million caused the Canucks fanbase to instantly balk, and time would show their concerns to be well warranted.
Eriksson’s first year in Vancouver saw his production fall off a cliff, dropping to a mere eleven goals and twenty-four points in sixty-five games played. The following seasons saw no improvement, with Eriksson frequently injured and never exceeding more than thirty points per season in a Canucks jersey. The Canucks continued to limp along through the twilight of the Sedins’ careers, with the twins finally hanging up their skates at the conclusion of the 2017–18 season.
In a sign that the hockey gods were bringing everything full circle for the franchise, the season after twins’ swan song also saw the rise of the Canucks’ next franchise player, who as it happened also hailed from the country of Sweden. The 2017 NHL Draft lottery had seemed to have been unlucky for the Canucks, as they dropped from the second pick (where they would have been based on record) to the fifth. But Pettersson was there for them at five, and he proved to be the steal of the draft. In 2018–19 he won the Calder Trophy as the league’s top rookie player, and 2019–20 further solidified his status as a supremely talented scorer and one of the best players in hockey.
Besides drafting Pettersson, 2019–20 saw a number of Benning’s other moves pay off. That year saw the debut of Quinn Hughes, who the Canucks had selected seventh overall in the 2018 draft. The left-handed defenseman wowed as a rookie this past season, putting up fifty-three points. One of Benning’s win-now moves also seemed to pay off, as he traded a first round draft pick to the Tampa Bay Lightning for J.T. Miller. Unlike Loui Eriksson, Miller shined in his new home, setting career highs in goals and total points.
All in all, the Canucks made enough of an improvement this season to qualify for the play in round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, where they will face the Minnesota Wild in a best of five matchup, their first taste of postseason action in nearly half a decade. But in order to solidify their status as a solid postseason contender beyond this year, the Canucks will have a tricky path to navigate.
The prevalance of bad contracts such as Eriksson’s and others eat up valuable space against the salary cap, forcing the Canucks to have to make difficult personnel decisions starting this offseason- especially with the salary cap frozen for two years due to the effect of COVID-19 on league revenue. The team’s top goaltender, Jacob Markstrom, is a pending unrestricted free agent, and the team may not have the space to resign. The Canucks have a young backup with potential in Thatcher Demko, but Markstrom is one of the league’s best netminders and being unable to resign him would be a definite step back in their hopes to build on their progress this past year.
Rumors have also circulated that the Canucks may have to trade Brock Boeser, a young scoring winger who would ideally figure as part of the core of their team as it seeks to consistently contend over the next few years. Benning was quick to shoot down these reports, but they are an indication of the types of sacrifices the Canucks will have to make. And an even bigger bill will come due after next season, when Pettersson’s rookie contract (at the minimum league pay scale) will expire, and he will likely command a rich long term extension. And the same will be true of Quinn Hughes in the season after that.
Jim Benning has undoubtedly helped draft and develop the young players that should form the core of the next great Vancouver Canucks team. However, it is in assembling the team around them that he has fallen short, signing players that fail to contribute much to overly large deals. If the team fails to reach the heights it did during the Sedin era or even surpass them, it will be for this unfortunate reason.
