In an ideal word, the Vancouver Canucks theoretically have a strong enough roster to build on last season's success. This isn't an ideal world however, with the reality of the organisation having to worry about injuries to Thatcher Demko and Arturs Silovs, which could conceivably see both goalies miss the start of the 2024-25 campaign.
Similarly, in an ideal world the Canucks would prefer not to use Long-Term Injured Reserve (LTIR) during the coming season at all. Again though, the reality is a different situation altogether.
Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin discussed his attempts to avoid using LTIR, during a one-on-one interview with Thomas Drance of The Athletic. He said: "Yeah, obviously it’s a challenge once you’re in LTIR. And we believe that we have different scenarios to not have to utilize LTI money prior to roster setting."
Utilizing LTIR is unavoidable
Of course, this alludes to the 49-year-old delaying utilizing LTIR as opposed to not using it full stop. He then admitted as much, when he said: "I wouldn’t say that it would be easier, but it would give us more options as we go along. I would prefer to be totally out of it, but that’s not going to be the case here."
As per PuckPedia, at the time of writing the Canucks have just $190,833 of cap space for the season ahead. This is essentially nothing, in the grand scheme of things.
As Canucks fans are well aware. last season saw Tucker Poolman and his $2.5 million salary placed on LTIR for the entire campaign. It was always assumed this would also be the case for the final year of his current deal, but Allvin is taking a different approach.
Signing Kevin Lankinen is no sure thing
This is why the recent speculation linking the Canucks to Kevin Lankinen as a short-term solution between the pipes, is not a straightforward situation. The Cancucks have apparently offered him less than $1 million for this season, but he has yet to bite.
This makes sense, when considering Lankinen made $2 million last season, and $1.5 million the season before. The Cancucks could resolve this by placing Poolman on LTIR right now, but they would prefer to hold off and leave such a scenario until the trade deadline.
In this respect, Allvin's thinking about delaying the seemingly inevitable makes sense. As he said to Drance: "We have some internal discussions about options to make it work the best and hopefully accrue some cap space (throughout the year)."
Of course all of this could have been avoided, if the Canucks had done a better job of taking care of Demko's knee injury. As we wrote about last week, Sportsnet's Elliotte Friedman recently reported the Cancucks forced their goalie to come back too soon, for the playoffs.
As a result, Friedman advised Demko's injury can no longer be resolved by surgery. Instead, the two-time NHL All-Star will now have to learn to play through his issue moving forward.
We are surprised to hear about all of this, just because of how much credit -- and rightly so -- Allvin and the rest of the front office have received, in turning around the Canucks organisation. Now though, they have a significant issue with the goalie position and by extension their financial situation, and it could have been avoided if not for their own apparent impatience.