Sportsnet 590 The FAN: Thomas Drance when asked about the Vancouver Canucks looking to add a defenseman after Filip Hronek went down with an injury. Would they prefer someone with term or a rental? The rental market may be slim and the cost could be high.
** NHLRumors.com transcription
Matt Marchese: “Do you think that they look at this and say, we’re just going to kind of, stem the tide here a little bit. See how things play out, and then if we, you know, run into a rut, then maybe we look to make a move. Or do you think they’re actively working the phones right now, looking for a defenseman?
Drance: “Oh, there’s no question. When it comes to Patrik Allvin and Jim Rutherford, they’re always actively working the phones, and they’ve definitely been looking for a defender. If there was a defender that they liked, right, who could come in and help at a cost that they deemed reasonable, they would have had them in Vancouver yesterday, right?
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And that’s been true for weeks, that this club, I think, identified pretty early in the season, that they probably needed additional help on the blue line. You know, the Hronek sort of injury here, I do think amps that need up.
We have seen this management group proactively seek out, you know, short-term upgrades when, when key players get injured. We saw them acquire Nikita Zadorov, for example, just a few days after Carson Soucy was rolled out for two to four weeks. That was roughly at this same time of the calendar, just a year ago.
So you know, I think when, what they’re weighing here, more than anything is a sense of being caught a little bit in between, right? You’ve got a bunch of interesting prospects, both down in Abbotsford, but also guys like Sawyer Mynio, who was invited to Canada’s World Junior camp week. Tom Willander playing at Boston University.
I think this club is pretty excited about what they’ve got coming, but I think they recognize that in the here and now, there are some limitations in terms of their overall organizational quality and depth frankly, too, on the back end.
They’d love to upgrade that. And honestly, the idea of acquiring a guy with term, I think that would be a selling point. I think they view that as a feature rather than a bug. And in fact, I think the way that they’re thinking about it, given, you know, you can list 10 other really good teams in this sport right now that really want, like a top-four capable defender, right? That, that’s what they need to add.
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Basically everyone except Vegas, Washington and New Jersey and Carolina, right? Like those four teams basically have complete blue lines. I think everyone else could use some help.
And you know, as you said, the options are not particularly robust. I mean, we’re definitely going to spend months talking about like Mike Matheson and Marcus Pettersson and a bunch of sort of non-needle-moving players over the course of the next few months, as we discuss sort of defender options ahead of the trade deadline, right?
Like this is not an especially enticing class of pending unrestricted free agent D. So what happens when you’ve got limited supply and huge demand? Well, costs go completely, you know, off the boards. They go bonkers.
And so how do you weigh that, right? How does this team weigh that? Are they willing to continue to spend significant assets in pursuit of rental players, the way they did with Elias Lindholm, the way they did with Nikita Zadorov a year ago? Or, or, you know, given the fact that this team’s form has listed and been a little bit less consistent this year, given what they’ve got coming, do they have to sort of be a little bit more careful?
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