It's the offseason!
In most years, I feel a sense of emptiness when the NHL season comes to an end, with a hockey-less summer looming. I've never been on board with "They shouldn't be playing hockey in June!" But maaaaaybe they shouldn't be playing in July?
That being said: congrats to the NHL on pulling off this season and getting the Stanley Cup awarded within their desired timeframe, with a couple of weeks to spare before the Olympics begin.
And congrats to the Tampa Bay Lightning for pulling off the rare Stanley Cup repeat, though their salary-cap magic hat might be running out of rabbits. Jon Cooper mentioned after the game that this year's run had a 'last day of school' vibe to it, because they know they probably won't be able to keep their group together going forward.
It was pretty cool that Ross Colton and David Savard, the only two guys on the team who didn't get rings last year, combined for the Cup-winning goal — the only goal of the game. And in the end, it was a no-brainer to give the Conn Smythe Trophy to Andrei Vasilevskiy, who played every minute of both playoff runs and is now up to five straight shutouts in series-clinching games, dating back to last year's Cup-winner against Dallas and all the way through Florida, Carolina, the Islanders and Montreal this year.
I'm eager to get started with offseason business. Jim Benning has promised to be aggressive, and the Canucks look poised to undergo a fairly significant makeover. Also, we're about a month behind schedule compared to a normal offseason. Training camp will be here before we know it, and it will all begin again.
CapFriendly has done a nice job of compiling the important dates to know over the next few weeks.
It starts Thursday night, with the first buyout period opening at midnight ET. But even though Benning specifically mentioned buyouts (plural) as a tool he could use this offseason, don't necessarily hold your breath for an announcement first thing Friday morning.
For one thing, the club is set to unveil the name of its new Abbotsford AHL franchise on Friday. And based on some domain name sleuthing by
Ben Lypka of the Abbotsford News, the most likely outcome is the Abbotsford Canucks.
I wasn't thrilled to hear this. It's a bit boring and it's also a bit confusing — we have to be that much more specific when referring to them. But I can see the argument that soccer fans are making, that it creates cohesiveness through a development program. And it's not dissimilar to the way we see teams organized in Russia and the other European Hockey Leagues. So I'm okay with it, if that's how things turn out.
Also, the buyout window is open all the way through the expansion draft and the draft, until July 27. So it could make sense to see what happens with some other moving parts before making decisions on buyouts.
But as we've discussed here many times before, the structure of the contracts of the players the Canucks would like to buy out doesn't actually generate significant savings. In most cases, it would be just as effective for the team to assign players to the AHL. The cap relief for buried contracts in 2021-22 is $1.125 million. If one of those players is replaced on the roster by somebody on a league-minimum salary of $750,000, that would generate $375,000 in cap relief — with no additional carryover burdens in future seasons.
I'm sure Benning would love to go into the offseason knowing just how much he needs to allocate to the new contracts for Elias Pettersson and Quinn Hughes. And out of the handful of signings that we've seen around the league over the last couple of weeks, none has been a second contract for a star RFA, so there are no new comparables to work off, yet.
I'm also hoping, after Benning appeared to do a poor job of communicating with his impending UFAs in the lead-up to the free agency period, that everyone is kept in the loop as much as possible this summer. There's still time, but this note on Travis Hamonic makes me worry that we might be in for more of the same.
It's possible that the Nate Schmidt situation is demanding some immediate attention. Though nobody has officially gone on the record, the rumours continue to swirl that Schmidt wants out after one season in Vancouver. And for a guy who's known for being so upbeat and gregarious, he did seem to lose his smile as the season went on — frustrated by bad luck on the ice, with own goals and such. And as a lover of the outdoors, Covid quarantine protocols may have hit him especially hard.
If the Canucks do move Schmidt, they can get out from under his $5.95 million cap hit. But then they have yet another hole they need to fill on the blue line.
I think if Schmidt returns in a better frame of mind, under a normal schedule, where he can move around freely, he'll look more like his usual self on the ice as well next season. But if the bridge is burned, then it's time to move on.
I wonder if Bo Horvat is on a recruiting mission of his own with Jordie Benn? This might be forged by the partners, since they went through their pregnancies and Covid births of their first children on basically the same schedule last year. Whatever the motivation, the two families are currently spending some offseason time together, posting plenty of pictures and videos to their Instagram Stories.
Benn, of course, is now a 33-year-old unrestricted free agent. He had one assist in eight games with the Winnipeg Jets after he was traded for a sixth-round pick at the deadline, and added one more assist in three appearances in the playoffs.
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