Donnie & Dhali: Eliotte Friedman on the Donnie and Dhali show on if there is a chance that the Vancouver Canucks will be able to clear salary cap space this offseason.
** NHLRumors.com transcription
Rick Dhaliwal: “There was a story in Vancouver about the Canucks don’t have much cap space for July 1st. It’s really tough moving bad contracts. Do you think it could still be done?
I know we July 1st isn’t too far away. The (J.T.) Miller’s, the (Brock) Boerser, the (Tyler) Myers, the (Conor) Garland. It’s tough to move them. Is there a chance it can happen?”
Friedman: “I think there’s always a chance. You know what Rick, one of the things you always forget is, first of all, there is always teams who are willing to be brokers, depending on what you’re willing to do. There are some teams who are not going to try to win next year, so you can call them and it depends on what they’re willing to do to help you. So that’s number one.
But the other thing is, and you always forget that this is, just look now, like for example here in Toronto where the city is burning down . Teams that lose in the playoffs, then they start to say, ‘Okay, what do we want to do here? How does this change the way we’re going to do things?’ I think you’re going to see that.
I think teams that either miss the playoffs and still want to contend. Or teams that get knocked out in the playoffs and want to change their mix, suddenly they start looking around and say, ‘Okay, we weren’t here a month ago but now we’re here and what does that mean?’
And I wouldn’t be surprised if the Canucks are going to have some of those teams that just missed the playoffs or some of those teams that make the playoffs or get knocked out earlier than they want, they open up possibilities because their situation changes.
So, I always think there is a willingness of teams to make moves, change their mix, and some of those situations become apparent during and after the playoffs that didn’t exist before. And I think that’s going to happen. I think there’s going to be teams out there that say, ‘Well, we didn’t have it with this group, what else do we got out there?’ Maybe they like something Vancouver’s got.
I think there are going to be routes here for the Canucks to find, they just have to be a little bit patient to see how everything plays out.”