Jim Benning’s off-season work is all-but done. The draft picks have been made, the unrestricted free agent veterans signed, and the restricted free agent young’uns re-signed. All that’s left is to sign a few aging free agents to professional tryout agreements heading into training camp.
Oh, and Bo Horvat.
Horvat is the Canucks’ final restricted free agent and easily the most important. He’s the odds-on favourite to succeed Henrik Sedin as the Canucks’ captain. He’s front and centre on the Canucks’ marketing as the new face of the franchise. With the Sedins declining, he’s the closest thing the Canucks have to a star player.
It’s essential that Benning and the Canucks don’t let negotiations with Horvat go long enough to become a distracting story. If training camp was about to begin and Horvat was still unsigned, that would become the story rather than the start of the Canucks’ season.
That’s why the report today from Don Taylor on TSN 1040 is such welcome news.
Taylor played coy with his co-host, Bob “The Moj” Marjanovich, jumping to the topic of Horvat out of nowhere after a discussion about lacrosse. He asked The Moj when he expected Horvat to get signed and he replied that he thought the contract would be announced just prior to training camp as a dose of good news heading into the start of what will likely be a rough season.
Clearly, Taylor had a scoop he was waiting to drop, letting his co-host go as far as betting a coffee on Horvat getting signed shortly before camp.
“Early next week,” said Don Taylor. “A little birdie has told me that it will be early next week...Bo Horvat will be signed early next week, at least, if he hasn’t been signed already, the public announcement will come out early next week.”
There are a couple possibilities here. One is that the contract is already signed and they’re delaying the announcement. Another is that the contract is fully negotiated, but they’re waiting to finalize it until Horvat comes to sign it in-person. And a third possibility is that the contract isn’t actually done, but they’re so close as to making it inevitable that it will be done in a week.
If the contract is done and they’re just delaying the announcement, Daily Hive sports editor Rob Williams suggests that it could be timed to coincide with the launch of Sportsnet 650. The new sports talk radio station kicks off on Monday, September 4th and it certainly seems plausible that the Canucks might throw a bone to their new broadcasting rights holders.
My suspicion is that the Canucks want Horvat to be there to sign the contract pen-to-paper rather than doing it by fax or electronically. That gives the marketing team a chance to make a signing video, take photographs, and conduct some on-camera interviews. Horvat is the face of the franchise now and they’ll want to give him some serious face-time.
