The Vancouver Canucks must free up cap space. Adam Proteau thinks of three ways to stay cap compliant if they don’t want a long rebuild.

The Vancouver Canucks have let down their fan base for yet another year. They went on a late-season run when they couldn’t get back into a playoff position and finished nowhere near the bottom of the league. As a result, they lost out on a good chance at selecting a franchise cornerstone player in one of the top three spots of the NHL draft.

Canucks GM Patrik Allvin is entering his second summer as Vancouver’s chief decision-maker, and he has his work cut out for him. The Canucks are the only team currently over the league’s projected salary cap ceiling of $83.5 million, per CapFriendly. Vancouver has 18 players signed for the 2023-24 campaign, and they’re already $668,750 over the upper limit of the cap. 

The organization has to make some notable personnel moves before the next season begins. 

How do they get there? We’ve got a few ideas on that front.

The first move the Canucks should be making is clearing out some cap space by changing the look of their defense corps. There are two veteran candidates who could be moved by Allvin: the first is Tyler Myers, the team’s elder statesman at age 33, who will have a cap hit of $6 million for the upcoming season. 

Myers does have a modified no-trade clause, but he can still be dealt to one of the 22 teams that aren’t on his no-trade list. He can still give a playoff contender upwards of 20 minutes per game, and as a right-shot defenseman with physicality, he’d have a number of teams Allvin could draw into a bidding war if Vancouver's offer is good enough. If the Canucks could acquire some younger (read: cheaper) assets, they could give themselves a good deal of cap flexibility.

The other member of the Canucks’ defense who could use a new home is 31-year-old D-man Oliver Ekman-Larsson. However, a trade out of town isn’t likely for Ekman-Larsson, who has four seasons remaining on his contract with a whopping cap hit of $7.26 million per season. No team in their right mind would trade for Ekman-Larsson’s contract, which leaves a contract buyout as the only realistic method of moving on from him.

CapFriendly’s buyout calculator for Ekman-Larsson illustrates the positives and negatives of a buyout for his services. Given that Arizona is retaining a small portion of Ekman-Larsson’s salary, Vancouver would save more than $7 million in cap space in the first season of the buyout. The Canucks would also save about $4.9 million in Year 2 of the buyout before that number would shrink to about $2.49 million in each of the following two seasons. After that, it'll cost the Canucks $2.127 million for each of the four years after his contract was supposed to end. That’s still a solid chunk of change to pay, but it sure beats Ekman-Larsson’s cap hit of $7.26 million for each of the next four years.

Finally, the other key piece who could be in play for Vancouver is winger Brock Boeser, who is under contract for two more seasons at a cap hit of $6.65 million. Boeser doesn’t have a no-trade or no-move clause in his current deal. 

Although the Canucks may want to bring him back and see how his game flourishes with star center Elias Pettersson, the 26-year-old could also bring back the kind of younger prospects or draft picks a team like Vancouver really needs at this point in its competitive cycle.

Certainly, the status quo shouldn’t be an option for the Canucks. The last thing they should want is another replay of this season, where they start the year by digging out a huge hole they can’t climb out from. That means there have to be difficult decisions ahead, and those decisions should be focused on the long term, even if it spells a backward or lateral step for the 2023-24 season. 

Allvin is under enormous pressure to change things up, but it shouldn’t be said that he didn’t have options to give Vancouver a different look this coming year. He absolutely does, and now it’s on him and Canucks ownership to show they can make big moves.