Donnie & Dhali: Elliotte Friedman on the Donnie & Dhali show talking about the Vancouver Canucks and their pending UFAs and RFAs, but mainly Elias Lindholm.
** NHLRumors.com transcription
Dhaliwal: “Elliotte, boy-oh-boy, the Canucks got a lot of free agents. Up to nine that are UFA or RFAs. Which ones do you expect them to get done and which ones are going to be tough contracts to get done in your eyes?
…
Friedman: “I would say, you know Rick, I was actually thinking about this a lot this morning. I, I think this, I think they’re gonna take runs at some of the guys that you don’t think that you expect they’re gonna be able to keep and that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re gonna be able to keep them.
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I would expect them to talk to (Elias) Lindholm and just say, ‘look like what’s this going to take? Give us give us a reasonable ballpark of what it can take.’ You know, I think they know exactly what’s (Nikita) Zadorov’s looking for.
You know, I think they, I think there’s, I think they’re going to try to make choices. And I don’t know if Lindholm is going to be possible. I would bet it’s probably not possible. But if you were to say to me this morning, who is the number one guy that the Canucks would try to re-sign? I would say it’s probably him. So I think what they’ll do is they’ll at least ask and say, ‘look, what do we have to do here?’
And the other thing that Jim Rutherford and Patrik Allvin have taught us is to expect the unexpected. You know, it’s easy to say ‘We can’t do this. We can’t do this.’ How many times over the last year have we looked at the Canucks and said ‘they can’t do something’ and Allvin and Rutherford, either try something different or they do something different.
And that doesn’t necessarily mean to me, they are going to be able to do different things. but I have learned to expect from this issue, from this group of Canucks front office, they will try to do things differently.
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So I think they are going to try to do some things that we don’t expect. To keep some players. I’m not saying they’re going to be successful but I think they’re gonna try. And I do think they’re going to try to keep Lindholm, I just, I just don’t know that it’s going to be possible.”