The NHL's free agency period begins in just 10 days, and I have a sneaking suspicion the Canucks will be busy. Not just because they have cap space, or because Jim Benning has already gone on record saying he'd like to add a 20-30 goal scorer and a versatile two-way winger, either. There was also this report from Elliotte Friedman in a recent edition of 30 Thoughts:
A GM on the Vancouver Canucks: “One of the free-agent wingers is going there. Just have to figure out which one.”
Someone check the real estate listings to see if anyone on this list has bought a house in Vancouver. And then check how much he bought it for, because my guess is we'll be able to figure out his cap hit -- in this housing market, I suspect they'll be roughly the same number.
Of course, there is a foolproof way to figure out who it is: wait until the day, and then check your phone for an alert. But in the meantime, it seems to me there's no harm in batting around a few names.
I'm not particularly interested in baseless speculation, mind you. I'm not an insider, and I'll save reading too much into small and likely meaningless details -- like, say, where someone was born, or that time he didn't say he wouldn't sign with the Canucks -- for someone else. Rather, I'm just gonna give you five guys I would like it to be.
Kyle Okposo. I have a hard time believing the Canucks will be able to land Okposo. Unless he and Jim Benning were pen pals at one point, I don't see much of a connection.
Plus he strikes me as one of the jewels of the draft. With three 20-goal seasons under his belt, and three more where he came within a tally or two, he's a proven scorer. And at 28, he's among the youngest of the high-end free agents. He'll be highly sought-after, which means he's going to cost a fortune.
But that doesn't stop me from wishing he'd come to Vancouver. (It's not my money.) Okposo is strong, he's fast, and he'd almost certainly be a 20-goal guy, and maybe even a 30-goal guy playing with the Sedins. He wouldn't be the first brother to thrive with them.
On that note, selfishly, as a black guy, I just want this team to have more black guys. Imagine him on a line with Emerson Etem, and, say, Bo Horvat between them. A square-jawed white guy flanked by cool black guys? We could call it the Jimmy Fallon line.
Loui Eriksson. Far more realistic, to my mind, is Eriksson, who has a history with Benning in Boston, and a history with the Sedins in Sweden. The upside with Eriksson? He's coming off a 30-goal season. The downside? Same. 30 goals in a contract year means you can pretty much write your own cheque come July.
But, again, it's not my money. This is just about who I'd like to see in a Canucks uniform, salary be damned, and I would like to see Eriksson. I don't care that he's 30, and many Canucks fans think the team should be nothing but teenagers right now. I like his game, which is so quietly effective he's been the NHL's most underrated player for a decade, and somehow everyone agrees on that, and I think he'd thrive either with the Sedins or with Horvat's line.
Plus if he chooses Ida Maria's "Louie" as his personalized goal song, I'll be buying his jersey.
Milan Lucic. I know all the reasons fans might not want Lucic. He seems like a bit of a tool. He's not very fast. And, at 28, he's already slowing down. He's still a good player, but as Jonathan Willis points out, when the Canucks are ready to compete again, he might not be anymore:
Naturally, he remains a very good player, but an NHL team signing him needs to project performance over the life of his contract. Given Lucic’s stature as a free agent, he will command term—in all likelihood, somewhere between 5-7 years. His performance is dipping already, in his late-20’s, so where is he going to be at 31 or 33 or 35 (which is when a seven-year deal would end)?
That projection makes him a bad fit for Vancouver, which is a rebuilding organization. It hasn’t fully abandoned the remnants of its previous core—the Sedin twins, Alex Edler—but the most pivotal players on its roster are from the Jake Virtanen/Bo Horvat/Brendan Gaunce age group. The defence and goaltending positions skew a little older, but Chris Tanev, Jacob Markstrom and Erik Gudbranson are all in their mid-20’s.
Attaching Lucic on a long-term contract to that young core would be decidedly inadvisable.
But whatever about that. Imagine him on the Sedin line. Imagine how much room the twins will have when the rest of the league realizes Milan Lucic will stand up for them like Neil Patrick Harris stands up for himself:
NPH and Dave Chappelle in the same scene. Undercover Brother is the greatest.
Anyway, I really just wanna see Milan Lucic collecting spines. You can't put a price on that.
Dale Weise.
To be fair, I don't really want this to happen. I just want to see Canucks fans react when it turns out Dale Weise is the big free-agent signing. And then Benning is all, he has good character, we see him as a culture carrier, and he had 48 points in 19 games in 2012-13. And then someone will be like, Jim, that was in the Dutch league, and then he'll be like, a skiprope league? Don't be ridiculous.
My hope is that the Canucks sign Lucic and Weise, and then make them share a room on the road, and then it becomes a reality show called Weisey and Looch. I'd watch that. Hell, I'd even subscribe to Shomi to watch that.
Jan Bulis.
Sure, he just retired from the KHL. But he said it was to spend more time with his family. WHAT IF WE ARE HIS FAMILY.
