Canucks notebook: Cuts, roster battles, new-look lines and salary-cap options

Sometimes an NHL practice can speak volumes.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Vancouver Canucks held a very telling practice at Rogers Arena. In the wake of deep cuts to reduce the size of the roster for the final week of the preseason, the Canucks rolled out a practice lineup that provided an unusual number of answers about which players will actually be on the team to open the 2024-25 campaign and how exactly coach Rick Tocchet is thinking about deploying them.

With notes on everything you need to know about the cuts, the remaining roster battles, what we learned from Tuesday’s practice and how Vancouver might handle some complicated cap maneuvering over the next week or so, let’s open the notebook.

The cuts

With nearly a full work week between preseason games and eight short days until the puck drops on the Canucks’ regular-season slate, Vancouver finally got down to its numbers, more or less, on Tuesday.

About an hour before the Canucks took the ice for practice, they reduced their roster by 13 — nine outright cuts, with four additional players designated for assignment after clearing waivers.

The only significant surprise of the group was Phillip Di Giuseppe, who is an NHL player. There’s a difference, and a substantive one, between an AHL player who can step up and give an NHL team some quality games, and a bona fide NHL player. With his size, pace, defensive and penalty-killing acumen and career third-line scoring clip five-on-five, Di Giuseppe is clearly the latter.

More than that, Di Giuseppe is also one of the greatest training camp players I’ve ever covered. Year in and year out, he’s prepared and in tip-top shape and absolutely crushes the training camp and preseason format. This year was no different.

For a younger NHL player trying to crack the 23-man roster for the first time in their career — Arshdeep Bains and Aatu Räty would still fit that description following Tuesday’s cuts — arriving at camp and having to beat out Di Giuseppe for a job is a big ask. It’s like an internal final boss aspiring NHL-level forwards have to defeat to truly crack the league.

There’s real organizational value in that, even beyond the depth hockey contributions Di Giuseppe offers. It’s one of the many reasons why the Canucks will be hopeful Di Giuseppe clears waivers on Wednesday, as Tocchet prominently noted. It’s also legitimately impressive that a couple of forwards like Bains and Räty were at a high enough level over the past two weeks to outlast a player like Di Giuseppe.

Among the other notable cuts, Elias Pettersson (the defender) and Kirill Kudryavtsev were cut on Tuesday but earned praise from Tocchet for their performance and ability to handle pressure. Pettersson looked like the higher-upside blue-line prospect, and by a considerable margin, throughout camp, but Kudryavtsev looked more NHL-ready. It wouldn’t be a shock to see either player slot into the NHL lineup at some point this season, but Kudryavtsev in particular made a case to be the first lefty call-up throughout camp and the preseason.

We haven’t spent much time discussing Ty Mueller, but it should be noted he had a strong performance throughout camp. Jonathan Lekkerimäki had some scintillating moments, especially during the training camp scrimmage and first preseason tilt, but ultimately looked like a player who would benefit from some seasoning in a major role in the AHL. Linus Karlsson looked close but didn’t do enough to hold off Bains and Räty.

Finally, Cole McWard was cut from the roster on Tuesday, which would have to mean he’s cleared and off injured reserve. As we’ll get into shortly, that’s massive at this time of year. As the Canucks look to set their opening night lineup, every injury, no matter how minor — and no matter the cap ramification of it — is a massive item for them to consider and administer.


Phillip Di Giuseppe was a surprising cut from the Canucks roster. (Bob Frid / Imagn Images)

The remaining battles

With the Canucks’ numbers reduced significantly on Tuesday — not counting the four players who have yet to clear waivers, they still have 25 healthy players on the roster a week out from the start of the regular season — the shape of the remaining roster battles has now crystallized. We’re down to a very short list of players competing for just a small handful of available jobs.

Among the forwards, Bains, Räty and Nils Åman survived Tuesday’s deep round of cuts. One of those players is likely to be in Vancouver’s opening night lineup, and most likely only two of the three finalists will make the opening night roster.

To some extent, the winner of this roster battle will be determined by factors outside of the control of the three remaining contestants for the one Canucks forward job available. Injuries — veteran centre Pius Suter was absent from practice on Tuesday, with Tocchet explaining he was banged up — and various cap considerations will carry a lot of weight in shaping the final roster decisions.

Of Bains, Räty and Åman, for example, only Åman requires waivers to be reassigned to Abbotsford. Given his age, positional versatility, height and precocious level of NHL experience early in his career, Åman would be at elevated risk of being claimed off of waivers. That should give him an edge over Bains and Räty, both of whom the club can freely reassign without risking their depth at a crucial position.

Meanwhile, on the back end, Noah Juulsen and Mark Friedman remain on the roster. Based on the available evidence, Juulsen would appear to be ahead of Friedman. That’s based on Juulsen’s status as a regular for the club throughout last season, whereas Friedman was utilized purely as a depth option from mid-November on. Juulsen also appeared in two postseason games, whereas Friedman appeared in none. That decision speaks volumes about the relative standing of Vancouver’s two leading defensive depth options.

Where this battle gets more interesting than it might seem at first glance, however, is when we zoom out and consider the Canucks’ cap options. If GM Patrik Allvin and company are able to avoid long-term injured reserve (LTI) as they’ve long planned to, they’ll likely only be able to enter the season with 21 players on the 23-man roster (assuming Tucker Poolman, Dakota Joshua and Thatcher Demko would be on injured reserve in this scenario). That would give them just one spare skater to bring on their first road trip of the year, which opens with a pair of games in Tampa Bay and Sunrise, Florida — about as far away, logistically, as an NHL team can get from its farm system.

In a world where the Canucks can only carry one depth player, could Friedman’s ability to line up as a winger, a left-side defender or a right-side defender give him an edge over Juulsen? Or will Juulsen’s size, penalty-killing prowess and stylistic fit with how Tocchet wants this team to defend permit him to win out?

Canucks first-choice lines and pairs take shape

With the herd thinning out rapidly on Tuesday, Canucks skaters took the ice at Rogers Arena — including J.T. Miller, who has been battling something minor but has continued to practice with the group throughout preseason — and Tocchet finally started to show his hand.

To this point, the Canucks lineup has had an experimental look in preseason games and at practice sessions. On Tuesday, the Canucks got down to business with a practice lineup that looked very much like one we might expect to see in an NHL game later this month:

Five scattered thoughts and observations about this lineup:

1. Quinn Hughes was always going to play with Filip Hronek, but challenging the newly extended right-handed defender to spend all of training camp and preseason with younger players looked from afar like an interesting gambit. Hronek looked especially engaged, vocal and assertive throughout camp and in his previous preseason game.

2. Tuesday’s practice marked the first time we saw the Canucks reunite Carson Soucy and Tyler Myers. Vancouver’s first-choice matchup pair in the playoffs, the team struggled to generate shots and scoring chances in Soucy-Myers’ minutes last season. Soucy has more to give offensively and Myers has two-way value, but if that pair is going to work as well this season as it did last spring, the team really needs them to maintain their defensive identity while finding ways to help them generate looks at a higher volume. Reasonable skepticism about what the Canucks can generate with the Soucy-Myers pair on the ice is amplified by the similar dynamic for the Derek Forbort and Vincent Desharnais pair.

3. Daniel Sprong with Elias Pettersson is going to be fun and fascinating. Can two of the league’s most consistent efficiency drivers push one another to even greater elevated shooting percentage heights?

4. Given how highly Tocchet values third-line contributions, we should probably interpret Nils Höglander sliding into Joshua’s usual slot on a line with Teddy Blueger and Conor Garland as a massive vote of confidence in the 23-year-old forward.

5. Danton Heinen hasn’t been a huge point producer in his career, but at five-on-five, he’s pretty consistently managed to score goals and produce points at a credible top-six rate. The Canucks will surely experiment a bit with possible line combinations for Miller and Brock Boeser, especially when Joshua gets back into the lineup and enhances the club’s overall depth, but Heinen has the offensive pop and the two-way reliability to take this opportunity and run with it.

The salary-cap fork in the road

Now that the Canucks are carrying a smaller handful of players, their route to salary-cap compliance is beginning to take shape.

What follows should be heavily qualified. A lot can change between now and when they set their opening day roster next week.

Akito Hirose, for example, wasn’t cut on Tuesday and wasn’t at practice either, with Tocchet indicating he sustained a concussion. Suter, also, was banged up and absent from practice on Tuesday.

If either player remains injured next week, that would significantly alter the Canucks’ cap considerations in setting their opening night lineup.

And all of that doesn’t even note that in each of the past two seasons, the Canucks have made a significant deal of altering their cap math during the first weekend of October.

These qualifiers aside, there are effectively two principal routes for them to consider from a cap-maneuvering perspective over the next week or so. Without getting too into the weeds detail-wise, it’s worth considering both of these routes have various advantages and drawbacks.

And we know, based on what the organization has said and how it has built this team over the past several months, which of the two routes they would prefer to travel in an ideal world.

The avoid-LTI-and-toll-daily-space route

This is the Canucks’ preferred route to take in setting their opening night lineup, and it speaks to their ambition entering 2024-25.

If they can avoid utilizing LTI, something the organization hasn’t managed in the last five years, they can “toll” cap space daily throughout the season.

The mechanism to be aware of here is that the NHL salary cap isn’t calculated based on the face value numbers that we utilize and are familiar with in discussing the sport. A team’s actual cap space is tabulated daily.

So if you’re a team that’s operating under the cap at the end of any given day during the regular season, that unused cap space rolls over. Teams that operate in this manner can effectively build up additional cap flexibility throughout the season and then utilize that cap space to enhance their flexibility and options at the trade deadline.

Teams that operate in LTI, however, are not operating under the cap; they’re operating permissibly over the salary-cap upper limit, and as a result, do not toll space daily.

The advantages of avoiding LTI are obvious, especially given this Canucks management group believes in tinkering with their roster throughout the season. It will be tight and tricky to pull off. They will have to get lucky on occasion in trying to thread the needle.

Done creatively and effectively and with ruthless discipline, however, if the Canucks can avoid utilizing LTI this season, they could theoretically carve out a few extra million in cap space between now and the trade deadline.

The drawbacks to this approach should be equally obvious. It will limit their margin for error and likely force the organization to make some extremely difficult choices on a game-to-game basis, and the entire exercise is extraordinarily fragile. A couple of key injuries could quickly scuttle the entire plan.

Let’s try to put into context the degree of difficulty at play here. The Canucks are already carrying some dead cap money on their books entering this season, the result of the Oliver Ekman-Larsson buyout and the Ilya Mikheyev retained salary transaction.

With Demko and Joshua out indefinitely, however, and Poolman’s $2.5 million remaining on ordinary injured reserve for the club to avoid LTI, Canucks hockey operations is going to effectively try to ice a competitive lineup to open the season with over $13 million in cap commitments that don’t project to contribute.

Given all of that, this effort is going to require some compromise. Most notably, if the Canucks are going to avoid LTI, they’re likely going to need to carry just 21 players on their opening day roster (with Demko, Poolman and Joshua opening the year on normal injured reserve).

That would leave them with just one depth skater to open the season. It would also require them to cut two of Bains, Räty and Åman and one of Friedman or Juulsen ahead of next week.

We noted this is a fragile plan. It hinges on Suter and Hirose being healthy in time for them to set their opening night roster, and it hinges too on them incurring no further injuries in their final preseason game on Friday against the Edmonton Oilers.

It’s going to be tight. An opening day lineup featuring the 21 players we included in our 23-man roster projection on Tuesday, for example, would come in just $100,000 beneath the upper limit of the salary cap according to CapWages’ estimates.

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The maximize-your-LTI-capture route

The other route the Canucks could take here would be to just utilize LTI, permitting them to exceed the upper limit of the salary cap by as much as they can capture of Poolman’s $2.5 million cap hit.

While this approach would have the drawback of locking them into a money-in, money-out pose for in-season trading, it would have the advantage of permitting them to carry more depth throughout the season. And it would give them more wiggle room in dealing with short-term injuries.

If the Canucks decide to utilize LTI or are forced to utilize it due to extraneous injury situations, their goal will be to maximize the $2.5 million capture when placing Poolman onto LTI next week.

There are some minor league players with interesting cap numbers — players like Ty Glover, Nikita Tolopilo and Lekkerimäki  — who could end up getting called up to the big club for opening day and drawing an NHL paycheck simply to help the Canucks capture as much as possible of Poolman’s $2.5 million in potential LTI space.

That they would prefer to focus on the trade deadline and playoffs in handling their cap this season speaks to the transformation this organization has undergone over the past 18 months or so. For the first time in an awfully long time, and to their credit, Canucks hockey operations appear to have their eyes on the real prize.

The sacrifices that executing this preferred approach will require shouldn’t be minimized, though. It could begin with the Canucks opening the season with limited depth, and it could continue with them being forced to make some excruciating decisions in-season — like playing a man short or going with a PTO player as a backup netminder — to actually pull it all off.

(Top photo of Aatu Räty and Nils Höglander: Bob Frid / Imagn Images)



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