Nine Canucks offseason thoughts: The risk in Thatcher Demko’s extension, and what comes next?

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It has been an uncharacteristically slow offseason for the Vancouver Canucks.

This is a team that’s usually among the NHL’s most notable movers and shakers in the Jim Rutherford and Patrik Allvin era. This summer, however, felt very different.

Aside from some minor signings and an affordable trade for Evander Kane, what Vancouver didn’t do so far this offseason is as notable as what it did.

The Canucks didn’t trade a top prospect for win-now help, despite having significant short-term needs.

They dealt one mid-round pick, their fourth-rounder, for veteran reinforcements, but otherwise made selections in the first, second and third rounds of the draft for the first time in seven years.

Yes, the Canucks extended some key players this summer. They certainly didn’t lean into a seller’s market to try to mine future value with the long view in mind.

There was, however, none of the “win-now desperation” that has so often characterized Vancouver’s offseasons across the past decade. This summer, the franchise has behaved as a team in transition that had to be focused on building for the future, despite some of the unique short-term pressures they face organizationally.

Is this quietly a summer that marks a new direction for the franchise, one in which the longer view is a greater priority than it has been in over a decade? It certainly feels that way.

Here are nine other thoughts on what we’ve seen from the Canucks this offseason, and where they go next.

1. The lesson of Brock Boeser: Do your business early in the cap growth era

Having exhausted all other options and knowing that Brock Boeser’s preference was always to stay put with the only franchise he’s ever played for, the Canucks moved to re-sign their top-line right winger on July 1.

It ultimately wasn’t about term, it was about overall compensation. Once Vancouver raised the total value of Boeser’s deal — influenced perhaps by missing out on some key centre targets, including Christian Dvorak and Mikael Granlund — it was able to get Boeser locked up.

Boeser always wanted to stay. After the Canucks dragged their feet on extending him last summer, however, Boeser’s camp waited them out.

For Boeser, his deal ultimately came in nearly $10 million in total value greater than what Vancouver was reportedly offering prior to the trade deadline.

It’s an interesting contrast that on the same day the Canucks pushed Boeser to the wire, before ultimately upping their offer, they reached agreements with Conor Garland (six years, $36 million) and Thatcher Demko (three years, $25.5 million) as soon as they became extension eligible.

In a world of steady cap growth, the advantages will flow to those teams that fix the costs of their talent as early as possible, for as long as possible.

In a world in which fewer high-end players are likely to even reach unrestricted free agency, getting your business done early and having some measure of control over your talent is where the edge and value lie for NHL teams.

The surprising way that July 1 played out for the Canucks was an on-the-nose distillation of this fork in the road moment in the commercial environment that governs the working relationship between NHL teams and their players.

2. A structural risk with the Thatcher Demko bet

We all know how gifted Demko is as a puck stopper, and we all know, too, that Demko’s new three-year extension comes with significant risks.

Even beyond the knee injury and the two other extended injury-related absences that Demko worked through last season, the 29-year-old has never put in a season in which he handled a 50-plus starts workload and was healthy at the end of the campaign.

As good as Demko is at stopping pucks, there’s a tremendous amount of value in availability for an NHL goaltender. Consider it this way: over four seasons since Braden Holtby was bought out and Demko was anointed as Vancouver’s No. 1, the Canucks have ranked seventh, 31st, seventh and 25th in team save percentage year over year.

In other words, when Demko has been healthy and Vancouver’s most frequently used starter, the club’s goaltending has been solid. In the other seasons, however, it’s ranked in the bottom 10.

From the club’s perspective, locking up Demko — in the wake of Kevin Lankinen’s five-year, $22.5 million contract — provides this team with a potentially league-best goaltending tandem. The position, of course, is too volatile to ensure that reality, but certainly Demko and Lankinen are a good bet to give this team better than average goaltending next season, with real upside for more than that.

Now $13 million of cap space allocated in net after this season is significant. It’s an amount the club felt comfortable investing between the pipes, given the dynamics of the cap growth era. $13 million against the cap by the 2027-28 campaign, after all, is the equivalent of investing $9.3 million in net during the flat cap era. That’s an amount no one would’ve batted an eyelash at in 2022-23.

Where I’m a bit more critical about the Demko bet isn’t so much about his injury history or the cap allocation involved. It’s more of a structural thing.

While Demko has the talent to provide surplus value on an $8.5 million cap valuation, the vast majority of netminders who earn in the neighbourhood of $8.5 million (or more) are workhorse starters. Part of their value usually stems from playing 55 games or more per season, which maximizes the value provided by their dependability.

*Note that Sergei Bobrovsky’s $10 million cap hit will expire following the 2025-26 campaign, before Demko’s new extension will kick in.

Even in the case of the closest Demko usage comps — Jeremy Swayman and Linus Ullmark, a former tandem with the Boston Bruins — while those netminders have averaged a similar number of games per season, their current contracts reflect a bet placed by their respective teams that they’re going to be able to continue to be dominant puck stoppers while handling a greater workload going forward.

That’s not the bet that Vancouver has placed on Demko. In fact, because of the recent Lankinen deal, there’s an element of the Demko contract in which it almost seems like the Canucks are betting against themselves. Essentially, for Demko’s deal to provide the club with surplus value, he’ll need to play 55 games or more per season. Given the implied logic of the Lankinen deal, however, that’s more than the Canucks clearly plan to utilize him.

3. Why the Canucks reject the notion of “running it back”

It’s easy to look at this Canucks roster and wonder “why exactly are they running back much the same team as the one that finished with 90 points last season and has missed the playoffs in four of the past five seasons, minus their third best forward from last season?”

However, the Canucks reject the notion that their offseason moves represent running it back. There’s a feeling that this roster changed significantly following the J.T. Miller trade, and a belief that the impact of those changes wasn’t something we ever really had the chance to see last season.

On the same day that the club executed the two-step Miller trade, adding Drew O’Connor, Marcus Pettersson, Victor Mancini and Filip Chytil, Quinn Hughes sustained an oblique injury which lingered (and was exacerbated by compensation injuries as he attempted to return to the lineup) for the duration of the campaign. Then Chytil was injured after 15 games, and Demko missed significant time down the stretch as well.

Now that the Canucks have added Kane and expect some fresh faces in the lineup from the prospect pipeline and the Calder Cup champion team in Abbotsford, they view this as a team that’s dealt with a fair bit of turnover across the past six months and is drastically different from the club we watched underperform last season.

The bulk of the core remains, but in the organization’s eyes, this is a very different team.

4. The volatility thing

It better be a very different team, because the Canucks clearly require something different. One might argue they require some consistency.

This era has felt like it’s been defined by volatility more than anything else. This is a team that always seems to hit the skinny part of the bell curve, on one extreme or the other.

Consider the four complete post-pandemic seasons. Following the Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Garland trade in the summer of 2021, the Canucks had 25 dismal games to open the 2021-22 campaign. They slid to the bottom of the NHL standings, which cost Travis Green and Jim Benning their jobs.

That same season, the Canucks had the miracle “Bruce There Is!” run under Bruce Boudreau. Across one 82-game stretch, we witnessed both this group’s bottom-end outcome, followed immediately by a sustained stretch that represented their 99th percentile outcome performance-wise.

The next year, in dispiritingly similar fashion, the club sagged under Boudreau for the first four months of the year and then rather quickly became a structured, workmanlike group under Rick Tocchet to close another disappointing campaign.

Obviously, the 2023-24 campaign was a dream. Then the 2024-25 campaign was a nightmare.

And so we look ahead to the 2025-26 campaign, and we’re left to wonder what fresh, unexpected drama awaits.

While the volatility of this era superficially makes it seem like this is an especially unpredictable Canucks team, the best way to get a handle on this group might simply be to expand the sample and consider the entire picture.

If we look at the last four years in totality, the picture that’s painted isn’t especially volatile. It’s just mediocre. The Canucks rank 17th in the NHL by point percentage since 2021-22, 15th in goals for and 16th in goals against. Just absolutely mid.

Considered through that lens, the real concern we should have about this team isn’t that it’s a group that seems to have a high ceiling but on whom the floor keeps falling out. No, the real concern isn’t inconsistency; it’s that the team is just about the definition of league average, it just arrives there in roller-coaster fashion.

5. Why the Canucks are prepared to go young on the back end

The return of Derek Forbort and the signing of P.O. Joseph give Vancouver some depth options on the back end, and the flexibility to start young blueliners Tom Willander and Elias Pettersson in the AHL if that’s how it shakes out at training camp.

However, Pettersson is earmarked for a full-time role in Vancouver, provided that he has a strong offseason. Likewise, it sounds very much like head coach Adam Foote and the Canucks are preparing to begin the season with Willander in the opening-night lineup.

6. A missed opportunity on Aatu Räty’s second contract

Despite sustaining an injury in the Calder Cup playoffs, which could inhibit his summer training, Aatu Räty is more than earmarked for a full-time NHL spot next season. He’d have to outright lose it to not begin the year in a top-nine role.

Räty, 22, had a strong AHL season and was highly productive across 33 NHL games. His foot speed improved, which allowed him to begin to capitalize on his potential. The Canucks are also desperate for a centre capable of winning draws the way Räty demonstrated he was capable of at the NHL level.

Given that Räty is going to get a significant opportunity this season, one wonders if the Canucks may have missed an opportunity to place a larger and longer-term bet on the young pivot this summer. Räty signed a two-year, one-way deal for the league minimum ahead of the qualifying offer deadline, a deal that is very much in line with the usual pathway for young players the Canucks believe in but who have yet to establish themselves as NHL regulars.

Those other players, however, weren’t poised to be essential stopgap options at one of the club’s weakest positions the way Räty is. Accordingly, and given the way the upper limit is set to rise over the next two years, one wonders if the Canucks might’ve missed an opportunity to take a home run cut on a young, high-floor forward who plays a premium position.

Something like a scaled back, centre version of the four-year, $13 million deal that the Vegas Golden Knights signed Kaedan Korczak to would’ve positioned the Canucks to lock in more upside in the event that Räty continues to progress as rapidly as he did last season. Now, if Räty can’t hack it, the club is going to be in serious trouble regardless. And if he can, Vancouver will be negotiating with an arbitration-eligible centre in a $113.5 million cap environment when this deal expires.

It might be marginal, but this may prove to be an opportunity missed.

7. Jonathan Lekkerimäki, a quick offseason turnaround and Vancouver’s most important out offensively

It was a successful first full North American professional season for Jonathan Lekkerimäki, who dominated the AHL regular season and flashed serious potential in the NHL. Lekkerimäki sputtered in the Calder Cup playoffs a bit as a 20-year-old, but don’t ignore the impact of an oral surgery that he underwent early on in the playoffs, and how that contributed to him running out of gas.

As a result of that surgery, Lekkerimäki was unable to eat for more than a week. He lost a significant amount of weight. And it took him a while to find his game and get caught back up, something he finally did in Game 5 of the Calder Cup Final.

Lekkerimäki has a lot of functional core strength to add and some serious work on his edges and skating technique to put in this summer. And he won’t have much time, given how long Abbotsford played into June on its way to a Calder Cup championship.

The Canucks, however, are confident that the playoff experience, even if Lekkerimäki wasn’t at his best for large portions of it and was a somewhat regular healthy scratch, is worth more than the training time he’ll miss this summer as a result.

If he can be a sparkplug third-line offensive contributor with power-play utility at the NHL level, and based on his trajectory there’s a reasonable chance he can be, that would be massive boost to the Canucks’ attack.

8. The quick evaporation of a Calder Cup champion and what’s next in Abbotsford

The Abbotsford Canucks had barely finished their Calder Cup champions parade when the team, in classic AHL fashion, was scattered by the business realities of minor league hockey.

Sammy Blais got a one-way deal in his hometown of Montreal. Phil Di Giuseppe got a healthy two-way deal with the Winnipeg Jets. Christian Wolanin and Akito Hirose (the latter of whom was non-tendered) will be permitted to walk as Abbotsford looks to get even younger on the back end. Tristen Nielsen will similarly depart the organization.

Coming into the fold is long, quad-A power forward MacKenzie MacEachern on a two-year, two-way deal. He’s a forward that brings a size and puck protection element that Foote highly values, and who the club views as a first call-up type in the Di Giuseppe mold. Joseph LaBate, a 2011 Canucks draft pick, has long been on the club’s radar, but caught the organization’s eye last season when he worked his way back up to the NHL level with Columbus and fought Jonah Gadjovich in a regular-season game. LaBate isn’t the same sort of wild man at the AHL level that Blais is, but he’ll be expected to add a toughness element for what’s trending to be a very young Abbotsford team.

Finally, defenceman Jimmy Schuldt was a captain in San Jose and is a transitional defensive defenceman. He plays a heavier game than Hirose, and will soak up fewer high-leverage offensive minutes than Wolanin would, leaving opportunity for younger players such as Kirill Kudryavtsev, Sawyer Mynio, Victor Mancini and perhaps Willander and Pettersson (depending on how camp shakes out).

9. This isn’t the finished product

The Canucks realized in about mid-June that their ability to execute on a plan to reimagine this team’s forward group had to be scaled back. They decided that they were comfortable with Chytil as their second-line centre if necessary, and avoided making any big mistakes in unrestricted free agency or on the trade market.

Don’t confuse realism, however, with satisfaction. Vancouver still bid on Dvorak and Granlund in free agency, a sign that the Canucks know their centre depth will need some work.

They intend to remain as aggressive as possible over the balance of this summer and into next season in searching for that “top-two line centre” that this lineup so clearly needs. They will comb through the free-agent market in the weeks ahead, too, as prices drop on the players who’ve fallen through the cracks in the marketplace.

It’s worth remembering that Pius Suter wasn’t added to the team until mid-August in 2023. Lankinen wasn’t signed until after training camp ahead of the 2024-25 campaign.

In the Rutherford and Allvin era, the Canucks are willing to be patient and are often still tinkering with their lineup into midsummer and even into the fall. That’s going to be the case again this year, and it really needs to be.

(Photo of Thatcher Demko, Brock Boeser and Aatu Räty: Mike Stobe / NHLI via Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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