President of Hockey Operations believes Canucks front office close to having salary cap situation under control

On the day he was hired nearly two years ago, Vancouver Canucks President of Hockey Operations Jim Rutherford identified creating a 'cap cushion' as one of his priorities. In that time, however, the Canucks have operated at or above the National Hockey League salary threshold and that's with the team executing one of the largest contract buyouts in league history.

On Wednesday, ahead of the start of Canucks training camp, Rutherford admitted that getting the salary cap under control remains a work in progress. Last year at this time, the team had to part with a second round draft pick to move the contract of Jason Dickinson to Chicago and yesterday had to tack on a third round pick to move Tanner Pearson and the final year of his $3.25M deal to Montreal.

"We still have work to do, we're not sitting here saying we're where we need to be," Rutherford said. "Based on what we had to deal with, we're still working through the cap. I think we've almost got it unraveled. We're probably a contract or two away from getting to where we want to be and then we can really move forward the way we want to."

Without mentioning names, Rutherford had to be pointing to the expiring deal of Tyler Myers that carries a $6M cap hit along with contracts for Brock Boeser (2 years remaining at $6.65M) and Conor Garland (3 years remaining at $4.95M).

All three of those names have been floated repeatedly in trade rumours yet all three remain on the Canucks roster. Rutherford blamed the NHL's flat cap for the difficulties the Canucks have had trying to shed salaries.

"Moves that were made prior to us coming here, I don't even disagree with them," Rutherford said. "People were making moves on teams thinking the cap would keep going up. And if the cap kept going up, we're not having this conversation. It's been a flat cap since COVID. That's going to change next year and also we're going to be at the point where we're out of some contracts that we'd prefer not to have. We'd hoped to do it quicker. We'd hoped to do everything quicker. We all want to win immediately. But we've moved as quick as we can. Whatever opportunities are there, we've taken. We'd like to have moved quicker, but we haven't."

Rutherford said that with the moves the Canucks have made this off-season he believes this is a playoff team -- IF -- everything goes right. The Canucks begin the process of getting things right with the first session of training camp on Thursay morning in Victoria.