2021 Top 10: #9 — Greeley: Where do the Vancouver Canucks go from here?
Welcome to the annual wrap-up of the most read articles of the last year!
Honest question: has there been more of a riveting team in the 2021-22 season so far than the Vancouver Canucks? They entered the year with massive expectations and fell flat on their face.
The club cleaned house on Dec. 6, but days before on Dec. 1, our own Steve Greeley was asking what is next for the Canucks.
What do they have coming?
This is where it gets tougher. The pipeline is not stocked.
Vancouver has not made a first-round pick since 2019 in Vasily Podkolzin – and he is already playing for Vancouver. Both Podkolzin and 2019 second rounder Nils Hoglander have arrived and are playing regular shifts. Though there have been moments of brilliance – especially from Hoglander – it has to be frustrating to look at the depth chart and see a lack of high-end talent coming.
In recent years, the Canucks’ development staff would have been singing the praises of Hughes, Pettersson, Podkolzin and Hoglander – but in the cold winter of 2022 the Canucks are now lacking the elite talent for their development staff to write home about.
The other difficult part of the equation is Vancouver’s salary cap picture. In a way, Benning refinanced the Canucks’ cap last summer, trading away $12 million in dead weight contracts (Loui Eriksson, Jay Beagle and Antoine Roussel) that were due to expire with one more season – opting to take on five additional years of Oliver Ekman-Larsson at $8.25 million and four more years of Garland at $4.95 million.
Ekman-Larsson has been fine, though he isn’t playing up to his contract now, and certainly won’t be over the next five years. Garland has been a bargain.
Zach Laing is the Nation Network’s news director and senior columnist. He can be followed on Twitter at @zjlaing, or reached by email at zach@oilersnation.com.