Canucks won’t do much at the trade deadline
Kevin Woodley of NHL.com: Vancouver Canucks GM Jim Benning said that they won’t do much at the trade deadline.
“Given what our team and individual players have gone through this last couple of weeks, I don’t expect us to be doing a whole lot at the deadline.
…
“It’s more the human side of things,” Benning said. “They’ve dealt with a lot in the last couple of weeks, getting the virus themselves and it running through families and stuff, and I just don’t think it’s the right thing to do at this point in time.”
Benning and Barry in RFAs Pettersson and Quinn
Kevin Woodley of NHL.com: Vancouver Canucks GM Jim Benning said that they have start preliminary contract extension talks with pending RFAs Elias Pettersson and Quinn Hughes.
“We’ve started preliminary talks with their agent,” Benning said. “We haven’t started talking numbers yet, but we’ve talked about from their side what they’re looking at, from our side as far as term is concerned. We’ll get to that more nowhere in this next couple of weeks.”
Rick Dhaliwal: Agent J.P. Barry on Pettersson and Hughes contract talks:
“We will work on both deals together like we did Toews and Kane in Chicago. Work on the structure. Environment for an offer sheet to Petey is depressed with no rising cap.”
Panthers don’t seem interested in trading Driedger
Tom Gulitti of NHL.com: Florida Panthers GM Bill Zito doesn’t seem that interested in trading pending UFA goaltender Chris Driedger.
“I get calls about guys, well, not too many about ‘Sasha’ (forward Aleksander Barkov) or whatever. But you get calls about everybody,” Zito told NHL.com. “We’ll address long-term and short-term needs for our team but won’t look to tear apart this team unless there are really compelling reasons, and a significant part of this team.”
The Panthers signed goaltender Spencer Knight and teams started checking in on Driedger status.