Nine Canucks offseason thoughts: Why Jake DeBrusk was the top target, and what’s next

It’s been a busy week for the Vancouver Canucks.

Between the extensions for Teddy Blueger, Tyler Myers and Dakota Joshua, the Ilya Mikheyev trade, the draft, and a free-agent frenzy performance that saw the club add seven standard player contracts valued at over $50 million in total, Vancouver’s roster is effectively full.

If we count up the list of Vancouver’s one-way contracts, players on two-way deals like Phil Di Giuseppe, Noah Juulsen and Nils Åman who spent the entirety of last season on the Canucks’ NHL roster, and free-agent goaltender Jiří Patera, we’ll produce 24 names on Vancouver’s 23-man roster. You’ll notice the incongruity there immediately.

Now obviously this all depends on how training camp flows and what decisions the club decides to make at the bottom end of the roster. Still, at the end of the business day on July 1, Vancouver’s lineup was in a state where Canucks management would already be comfortable going into opening night with the players in the organization. And the team would be cap compliant with a full 23-man roster too.

In fact, beyond ordinary compliance, Vancouver still has some legitimate cap flexibility.

If the Canucks were to roll into the season without any additional roster moves, they’d project to have about $1-$1.25 million in cap space with a 22-man roster before placing Tucker Poolman’s salary on long-term injured reserve (LTIR).

This is where Vancouver’s options get interesting. The team would prefer to operate outside of LTIR this season, tolling daily cap space for the purpose of maximizing roster flexibility at the trade deadline. The club’s inability to add pieces for cap reasons after trading for Nikita Zadorov and then Elias Lindholm at the trade deadline this spring was a serious source of internal frustration for Patrik Allvin and Jim Rutherford. It’s a scenario management would love to avoid bumping into again this season.

That said, the Canucks could feasibly still add roughly $3.5 million in salary to their lineup this summer or during the season if they were to utilize LTIR. And that could be tempting too, depending on what opportunities present themselves.

Asking around about what comes next for Vancouver this offseason, Canucks management is intent on being patient.

Though the team doesn’t expect an offer sheet to arrive for Arturs Silovs and would match it if it did, the cap flexibility Vancouver is sitting on provides a moat of security around that remote prospect.

Canucks management could also seize on an opportunity to buy a value free agent available later this summer, attempting to find another Pius Suter-type undervalued gem.

They could even acquire a player in a trade with a cap-strapped team at reduced cost, perhaps even picking up an additional draft pick in the process. No, seriously, that’s a real possibility that Canucks hockey operations is discussing at the moment.

Finally, the Canucks could maximize their options in-season, and look to add to the roster after they see how their new mix of players perform for a few weeks once the 2024-25 campaign gets underway.

All of these scenarios, and particularly the latter three, will be an active consideration for Canucks hockey operations as the summer rolls along. They’ve positioned themselves so they can afford to wait it out. And they intend to see what opportunities present themselves before deciding which route to go with the cap flexibility Vancouver still has remaining.

Here are nine thoughts on the Canucks’ free-agent moves and their offseason so far.

1. Jake DeBrusk appears to have been the Canucks’ top target

The Canucks never attempted to trade for Jake Guentzel’s signing rights.

While Canucks brass loves the player and would’ve found a way to make it work if Guentzel had made it to free agency, and been open to coming out West, the club was concerned with how adding a $9-$10 million cap hit to the books might impact the team’s balance. All along they preferred the younger, more affordable option of Jake DeBrusk to punch up their top-six forward group.

Obviously the Canucks kept a tight lid on information surrounding their intentions in free agency, to the point of breaking nearly all of their own signings themselves, but multiple team sources indicated to The Athletic once the dust settled on Monday that one of the reasons Vancouver didn’t try to trade for Guentzel’s rights is that DeBrusk was their primary top-six forward target all along.

2. Trading term for AAV

Fit, speed and defensive impact were key factors in Vancouver’s pursuit of DeBrusk when the market opened on Monday. His age — DeBrusk is 27, and will turn 28 during this season — was a major selling point from the Canucks’ perspective. They viewed him as the youngest option capable of meaningfully punching up their attack.

Part of the reasoning here is that the team wanted to carefully manage the annual average value of whichever top-six forward they signed. Because of DeBrusk’s age, the team was comfortable and able to trade term to lower the annual average value of the deal — ultimately getting it into the mid-$5 million range.

The structure of the deal has some risk mitigation measures in place. DeBrusk’s deal is signing-bonus-laden, but only includes $1.5 million in signing bonus in each of the final two years of the deal. The contract isn’t an easy buyout in the latter years of the deal, but it’s certainly not a buyout-proof contract either.

Additionally, DeBrusk’s deal will convert from a full no-movement clause in the first three years to a relatively broad 15-team no-trade list in the latter half of the seven-year deal.

3. “I envision him starting with Petey.”

The Canucks are going to give DeBrusk every opportunity to find chemistry with Elias Pettersson at training camp. He’ll also get a long look on the first power-play unit, and the team intends on helping him figure out how to be effective in the bumper when he’s spent much of his NHL career to this point at the net front.

While Pettersson needs a winger like DeBrusk, a player with some speed, snarl and finish, I can’t escape the thought that DeBrusk’s game — his predictability, speed, physical play and finishing ability — might as well have been designed in a lab to complement the J.T. Miller, Brock Boeser line in that left-wing spot.

Danton Heinen has almost been a Canucks player so many times over. Several years ago he was nearly acquired by the previous regime for Jake Virtanen, a huge missed opportunity trade in retrospect.

Allvin, in particular, is a huge fan of Heinen’s game. The team considered signing Heinen in the summer of 2022 and again in the fall of 2023 before his PTO with the Boston Bruins was converted to a league-minimum salary. In both instances, the Canucks’ glut of wingers prevented Allvin from pulling the trigger to land his guy.

This time out, Vancouver had a need for multiple top-nine wingers. They weren’t going to miss out on Heinen again.

Kiefer Sherwood obviously impressed the Canucks with his performance in their first-round series against the Nashville Predators. Or, at least, he impressed those Canucks not named Hughes:

“I talked to Quinn (Hughes) here, and he was more excited about Kierffer Sherwood than anybody,” jokes Patrik Allvin. “He said he pissed the whole team off (during the #Canucks‘ first round playoff series vs. Nashville).”

— Thomas Drance (@ThomasDrance) July 1, 2024

Sherwood is tabbed as the Sam Lafferty replacement. He might be a smaller body, but the club wanted to bring in a fourth-line presence with a nastier game, a bottom-six winger who played to their identity on a more consistent basis than Lafferty managed last season.

Canucks hockey operations think more highly of Sherwood than that, however, even if they’d be deeply reluctant to say so publicly. This is more a storyline for training camp and in season, but there’s a school of thought that with Sherwood’s speed and willingness to mix it up, it may be worth seeing whether Sherwood is capable of effectively complementing Pettersson in a second-line role at some point this season.

If that seems like several bridges too far, and it’s certainly a high upside bet, it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility. Over the past two seasons, Sherwood has scored 0.83 goals per hour at five-on-five, which is a credible top-six rate, and comparable to what players like Frank Vatrano and Alexis Lafrenière have managed over the time period (albeit in far more ice time). Throw in Sherwood’s robust American League scoring profile, and there’s a remote but legitimate shot that he has the chops to play higher up the lineup than Canucks fans currently imagine.

6. The third-pair players

What do David Desharnais and Derek Forbort have in common?

They’re massive human beings, of course, and that was essential. Maintaining the back-end size that permitted the Canucks to play solid, structural defensive hockey was a key priority for Vancouver hockey operations when the market opened on Monday.

They’re also affordable, and that part was crucial. The team seems to view Forbort specifically as a one-for-one replacement with Ian Cole, who signed with the Utah Hockey Club for more than double the price that Forbort netted in Vancouver. Desharnais is viewed internally as a bit more of a project, a player their professional scouting staff and assistant coach Adam Foote specifically targeted, in the belief that they can get more out of him than what he showed in Edmonton across his season-and-a-half in the NHL.

One more thing: They’re both unquestionably elite penalty killers. Last week, before signing Blueger, Myers and Joshua, the Canucks were poised to lose all six of their playoff short-handed minutes leaders in free agency. Now, with those three back in the fold, and additional penalty-kill options like Forbort, Desharnais, Heinen, Sherwood and DeBrusk incoming on Monday, Vancouver will have robust short-handed options — even if Lindholm’s faceoff-winning ability will still be sorely missed.

7. The puck-moving thing

Zadorov will be missed for any number of reasons, but don’t ignore the value he brought as a secondary puck mover to the Vancouver back end. It’s a critical element that Vancouver wasn’t able to replace on Monday.

This got at the heart of Vancouver’s biggest flaw last season: their inability to generate quality looks. It’s an issue that was especially prominent whenever the Hughes and Filip Hronek pair took a breather last season. In those minutes, Vancouver’s ability to generate quality looks, scoring chances and goals fell off significantly.

Vancouver’s blue-line group last season was exceptionally well constructed to prevent scoring chances from dangerous areas of the ice. The Canucks also leveraged their size advantage on the back end in the neutral zone expertly, as Vancouver’s defenders squeezed aggressively with imposing collective size at the defensive blue line, with Vancouver’s forwards herding puck carriers impossibly toward them by cheating strong side with a neutral zone wedge. Desharnais and Forbort both profile as players who should fit into this play style rather neatly.

While the club’s size on the back end and their method of deploying it was a major reason for the club’s historic year-over-year turnaround as a defensive unit, it comes with something of a trade off at the other end of the ice. Vancouver didn’t generate much with their second and third pairs on the ice last season, and Forbort and Desharnais aren’t typically as adept at moving the puck as Zadorov and Cole are.

This trade-off was felt significantly in the postseason.

During the Canucks’ 13-game playoff run, Vancouver generated 108 five-on-five shots and no goal in Hughes’ 244 five-on-five minutes. That’s about a 26 shots on goal per 60 rate, which is relatively low.

When Hughes took a breather, however, Vancouver’s ability to threaten fell off a cliff. In the 377 minutes that Hughes wasn’t on the ice at five-on-five during the postseason, the club managed an anemic 102 five-on-five shots on goal (about 16 shots per 60).

Between Zadorov’s marauding forays up ice and Cole’s smart, hesitation passing, Vancouver lost some critical secondary puck-moving ability this offseason and didn’t replace it.

It’s something to monitor. Whether the Forbort-Desharnais duo can provide a high enough puck-moving baseline, or not, is an open question and something of an experiment for the Canucks. It’s an experiment that the club itself even privately acknowledges could require tweaking — in terms of systems approach, or potential additions on the trade market — as the season goes along if it doesn’t work as the club hopes.

“That’s something we talked about, do we need more puck movers on our team?” Allvin noted on Monday, “But I still feel that the additions here today are capable of playing simple and within the structure we have. We anticipate playing fast hockey and I think those guys are capable of delivering a first pass.”

8. The Group VI acquisition

On one of the busiest hockey news days of the year, it’s easy to lose sight of the team signing a 25-year-old Group VI free agent from the defunct Arizona Coyotes organization.

Given how few contract slots the Canucks had going into Monday’s free agent frenzy, however, the signing of Nathan Smith, a right-handed centreman who spent most of this past season with the Tuscon Roadrunners, to a one-year, two-way deal shouldn’t be ignored.

Smith is likely to open the season with the Abbotsford Canucks and serve as a Sheldon Dries replacement at the American League level, but this is a young player that Canucks assistant general manager Ryan Johnson has been keeping close eyes on since his college days. He may be American League bound to open the season, but the club targeted him with NHL upside in mind.

“He was highly touted out of school,” Johnson recounted to The Athletic on Monday, “He ended up in the Bryan Little trade to Arizona.

“He dealt with a bad ankle injury right out of the gate and I felt like he never really caught up to what I’d seen from him in college. I watched him closely, and knowing his situation, you started to notice by the end of last year and throughout this year, that he was standing out in terms of his details and skill level and compete.

“These second organization guys are guys I really look at. Do they need a different opportunity? A different look? A new setting? Some new belief in them?”

Vancouver has had an interesting track record scouring nontraditional talent pools for depth players. Dakota Joshua is the obvious standout, but Åman was also an unsigned draft pick out of Sweden and has provided depth value to the club over the past few years.

“Not that they’ll all be like Dakota,” Johnson noted. “But Smith is a guy we want to put some time and resources into.

“We were fortunate to get him on board this morning, and he’s a guy we think has more in there.”

9. Patera, Silovs and the lingering goaltending question

Vancouver shifted strategies in net over the past week, even re-engaging in contract talks with Casey DeSmith and ultimately pursuing and landing the 25-year-old Patera from Vegas, and it’s still not clear exactly why.

The Canucks are playing their reasoning close to the vest. Allvin was asked directly if the team’s moves in net had anything to do with Thatcher Demko’s rehab process and suggested strongly that it didn’t.

“He’s going to be ready for camp,” Allvin said of Vancouver’s star netminder. “He’s doing his rehab, or starting his summer training here, but I met with him quickly down in Vegas this week. He doesn’t seem to need a procedure.”

Patera is an interesting project. He’s a big, athletic 25-year-old netminder and has flashed solidly at the NHL level over the past two seasons, while keeping his head above water on a porous Henderson Silver Knights defensive team at the American League level.

The club isn’t remotely concerned about a Silovs offer sheet, but it doesn’t sound like they’re close to extending their restricted free agent netminder either. Silovs, 23, is a restricted player without arbitration rights, so his leverage is limited.

The team wants to do a two-year show-me contract with Silovs along the same lines as the contracts they signed Vasili Podkolzin and Nils Höglander to over the past two years. So far progress has been slow-going.

Silovs is still the Canucks’ most likely backup going into next season, but he’s also waiver exempt, whereas Patera is not. The battle for the backup spot in Vancouver’s crease should shape up to be an interesting one.

(Top photo of Jake DeBrusk: Richard T Gagnon / Getty Images)