Vancouver Canucks: How Clayton Keller deal affects Boeser negotiations
Vancouver Canucks forward Brock Boeser remains to be signed. On Wednesday, both Nikolay Goldobin and Arizona Coyotes forward Clayton Keller received new contracts.
On Wednesday, many Vancouver Canucks players were on the ice at Rogers Arena and were made available to media. Elias Pettersson addressed his noticeably more built physique, Olli Juolevi was on the ice and confirmed clear for contact, and Loui Eriksson indeed did return to Vancouver. One player who wasn’t at Rogers Arena yesterday, however, was Brock Boeser.
Boeser remains without a contract as we get closer and closer to training camp, which is set to begin in Victoria on September 13th. That’s just eight days away and time is quickly dwindling on the time in which the Canucks and Boeser’s camp have to come to an agreement on a new deal.
Both sides have made it clear that they don’t want these negotiations to carry over into training camp and that both Boeser and the Canucks would like for this thing to get done before then.
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Boeser is just one on a laundry list of high-end restricted free agents who have yet to sign new contracts. Players such as Patrik Laine, Kyle Connor, Mikko Rantanen, and most notably, Mitch Marner, all remain unsigned as we get closer and closer to NHL training camps underway.
The latest young NHL star to sign a contract is Arizona Coyotes’ forward Clayton Keller, who had his rookie season back in 2017-18, the same year as Boeser. In fact, Keller finished third in Calder Trophy voting, just behind Boeser who was beat out by New York Islanders forward and Coquitlam native Mat Barzal.
Because Boeser played nine games with the Canucks at the end of the 2016-17 season after his NCAA season at the University of North Dakota came to an end, Boeser’s ELC expired a year before Keller’s did. Keller was due to become an RFA at the end of next season, but obviously, the Coyotes have seen what’s been going on with this year’s batch of young, high-end RFA’s.
They elected to lock up one of their core young players with an eight-year deal with a yearly cap hit of $7.15 million. While it may seem like Keller is overpaid now, the salary cap is almost guaranteed to increase in the coming years, similar to how it did when the Vegas Golden Knights joined the league.
All the talk this offseason has been about how the RFA camps are waiting to see what kind of deals the others are getting. In fact, I wrote an article over at The Hockey Writers breaking down which RFA’s Boeser and the Canucks are waiting on. The big one is obviously Marner that will affect the remaining pending deals the most, but I don’t think anybody was anticipating that Keller would affect this year’s group of RFA’s.
If I’m Boeser’s camp, I’m showing this deal to the Canucks and saying, “$7 million is too much to pay Brock long term? Really?” Now, we will never know for certain whether it’s money or term that the two sides can’t agree on, but we’ve been hearing a lot of both. Whatever it is, it’s now going to be even harder for the Canucks to give Boeser any less than $7 million than it was before.
If Keller’s deal is one of the only indicators to the remaining RFA’s as to what the market is currently like, then it becomes a lot easier for Boeser and his camp to show why Brock deserves to receive a bigger payday than the one Keller got. Last year, Keller scored 14 goals and tallied 33 assists in a full 82 games.
Boeser, on the other hand, scored 12 more goals than Keller and picked up the same number of assists — in just 69 games. Boeser wasn’t 100% in a handful of those games, either.
While the Keller deal may be considered a bad deal by some, the Coyotes believe in their star youngster, and right now, it’s one of the only deals that the two sides can use as a comparable for the deal that both sides oh so badly want to get done before training camp begins.