Sekeres and Price: Frank Seravalli when asked if he thinks the Vancouver Canucks continue to be active and get ahead of other teams on the trade front, and keeping an eye on the Pittsburgh Penguins.
** NHLRumors.com transcription
Jeff Paterson: “Frank, with Jim Rutherford history and now we’ve seen that that sort of approach has been passed along to Patrik Allvin. In a time when trades are too hard to come by the Canucks have been active. They’ve already made the (Nikita) Zadorov deal.
But just looking at the way Jim Rutherford was operated, trying to get out in front of paying market prices, do you anticipate the Canucks getting a jump on the market and again here, if this management group truly believes in the group that they put on the ice?
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Seravalli: “I do and I think that they’ve been probably pretty active. One of the more active teams and making calls and try and you know, work through their lists to see who’s available and who isn’t. That’s going to crystallize and change a bit in the next three to four weeks.
You know, I know the connection has always been what, what about the Pittsburgh Penguins? What, you know, is there a player from that team that you know, Patrik Allvin and, and Jim Rutherford would like to pluck?
I think, watching the Penguins, for instance, will be one of the more fascinating teams heading into the deadline. (Penguins GM) Kyle Dubas basically said a number of weeks ago that they have six weeks until early February, to get their act together. They’re meandering along through the season and, and not really breaking through. Although their underlying metrics seemed to be pretty good, their goal differential, all those things that you would typically look for. And they’ve won a few games in a row and then all of a sudden you look at the standings and they haven’t really made up much ground and solidified a playoff spot.
So I think to bring it back to Van, um their, I don’t really have any doubt in my mind that they’re going to be active. My big question would be, there’s a difference between being active and really being aggressive with the chips that you have to move. And that part I don’t really have a clear line of sight yet on what exactly the MO of this Canucks front office team will be.
Do they think that what they’ve accomplished to this point has been nice, and we’ll see how they react when they’re in the pressure cooker of the playoffs? Or is this front office going to you know, kind of throw caution to the wind and trade, you know, those massive assets that you do you have in your in your arsenal to try and really improve this team to go after it this year?
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I would say that, you know, there’s a lot of people in the league that would tend to believe you need to go through a process. You need to have some playoff entries and failures before you can really break through and win. But, I mean, I think there’s also a pretty long list of teams that didn’t realize exactly what they had in front of them and the opportunity that they had that let that fall by the wayside.
