The Vancouver Canucks wrapped up the on-ice portion of their pre-season Friday night at Rogers Arena with a 4-0 shutout win over the Arizona Coyotes.
But GM Patrik Allvin said he’ll continue working the phones over Canadian Thanksgiving weekend after pulling off a mid-game trade on Friday that addressed a positional need and opened up some salary-cap space.
With defenseman Travis Dermott currently out of action after suffering a concussion during practice and Tyler Myers now expected to miss two-to-four weeks with a lower-body injury, Allvin acquired defenseman Riley Stillman from the Chicago Blackhawks on Friday night in exchange for center Jason Dickinson and a second-round pick in the 2024 draft.
“We’ve got a couple D hurt,” said coach Bruce Boudreau after the game. “We certainly need a defenseman.”
Stillman, 24, was a fourth-round pick by the Florida Panthers in 2016 and was dealt to the Blackhawks as part of a multi-player deal just ahead of the 2021 trade deadline. In 108 career NHL games, he has three goals, 18 points and 68 penalty minutes.
“We see him as a third-pairing defenseman, character guy, hard to play against,” Allvin told the Vancouver media during the second intermission on Friday night.
Allvin was on the hunt for blue-line depth throughout the off-season. Until now, he hadn’t found a trade to his liking.
As well as helping to shore up the blue line, Friday’s deal also addresses another off-season objective — improving salary-cap flexibility.
Dickinson was under contract for two more seasons at a cap hit of $2.65 million per year. Stillman’s cap hit is $1.35 million for the next two years. So the trade itself gives Vancouver another $1.3 million to maneuver. The cost? That second-round pick.
“It’s something that me and my staff always talk about — the value of cash, the value of picks,” Allvin said. “You see around the league what what it costs in today’s cap world.”
The deal also opens up a bit more roster room at forward. With J.T. Miller, Bo Horvat and Elias Pettersson at center, the Canucks are deep in the middle.
Dickinson started pre-season in the mix for a spot on the fourth line with new arrivals Curtis Lazar and Dakota Joshua, who can also both play in the middle. The bottom six has since become even more crowded, with 22-year-old free-agent signing Nils Aman showing good puck smarts and strong defensive reliability after coming to North America from his native Sweden.
“We do think that Aman’s played really well,” Boudreau said. “We hate to see Dickie go… But to get something, you have to give something.”
The Canucks’ complicated injury picture makes it difficult to project exactly how they’ll set their opening day roster for Monday’s deadline at 5 p.m. ET.
As things currently stand, the final year of the contract of injured forward Micheal Ferland will give the club $3.5 million worth of long-term injured reserve space.
At this point, it doesn’t appear that timelines for any of the club’s other injured players would allow for LTIR assignments, which must be for a minimum of 10 games and 24 days.
In addition to defensemen Dermott and Myers, Brock Boeser is recovering from hand surgery after suffering an injury early in training camp. Ilya Mikheyev has been sidelined since the first pre-season game on Sept. 25 and winger Phil Di Giuseppe has a lower-body injury that could keep him out for two-to-four weeks.
Conor Garland also left Friday’s game midway through the second period and did not return. Boudreau said after the game that while he had not yet spoken to the team’s doctors, he didn’t believe it was anything serious.
When training camp opened, Boudreau said he wanted to try to establish some consistent lines and pairings early on. Things didn’t work out that way. But while filling those injury-related roster holes, the coaching staff may have uncovered some hidden gems in the form of players like Aman, fellow Swedish rookie Linus Karlsson and depth defenseman Christian Wolanin, the 27-year-old who’s been steady in his first four games for Vancouver after signing a two-way free-agent contract this summer.
“I’ve been very pleased with Christian Wolanin,” Allvin said. “He’s really showing us what he’s capable to do, and I believe that he’s giving the coaches options, again, for being in the top six.”
When asked if his newly acquired cap space could help set the stage for another move before Monday’s roster deadline, Allvin left the door open.
“Could be — we’ll see,” he smiled. “We’ve got a couple of days here to keep you guys (the media) busy.”
Outshooting the undermanned Coyotes 32-7 and standing their ground as the game got chippy in the third period on Friday, the Canucks may not have been tested as much as they would have liked. But after going winless in their first five pre-season games (0-3-2), they wrapped up their exhibition schedule with back-to-back wins.
“I think we checked, checked, checked — and that’s what we wanted to do,” Boudreau said. “We wanted to have a good start. We got that. We checked those boxes.
“We still worked our butts off. We didn’t care about them. We wanted to work hard, and we worked hard.”
The Canucks regular season begins with a five-game road trip, which kicks off next Wednesday in Edmonton.
