Bo Horvat not close to new contract with Canucks: report
With just four days before training camp kicks off in Whistler, Bo Horvat and the Vancouver Canucks are reportedly far apart in contract negotiations.
The Canucks captain is a pending unrestricted free agent, meaning he can sign anywhere he pleases next summer if he remains unsigned.
J.T. Miller was supposed to be the difficult contract to get signed, but perhaps it’s Horvat instead.
“Nothing was close,” said Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman, speaking on the Horvat negotiation in an interview with Don Taylor and Rick Dhaliwal on CHEK this morning.
Friedman was careful to mention that things can change, as they did with the Miller negotiation, in which he said the Canucks made an organizational decision to “pivot” and change their strategy.
But still, this isn’t where many people thought Horvat would be at this point in the proceedings.
“The last I checked on Horvat last week, I had heard that there was nothing close, and it wasn’t progressing,” said Friedman. “But what do I know now? I know that if the Vancouver Canucks want to get this done, they can get it done tomorrow, basically… So I’m weary of that.”
Friedman said he believes Horvat’s contract will be worth more than $7 million per season “at the very least,” if not over $8 million.
Miller’s contract extension carries an $8 million cap hit, beginning next year. While Horvat can’t match Miller’s offensive production over the past three seasons, he is two years younger. That should help Horvat in negotiations, as the risky portion of Miller’s deal is at the tail-end of his contract when he’ll be 37 years old.
“I still believe that if Bo Horvat wants to stay and the Vancouver Canucks want him to stay, and I have no reason to believe any different, there’s a way to get a deal done here.”
And perhaps that’s why panic hasn’t set in with the local media and fans yet. The belief is that Horvat wants to play in Vancouver and that the Canucks are happy with him. That should produce a deal.
But what if it doesn’t?
The Canucks do have a lot of money tied up in forwards, and Horvat is theoretically their third-best centre.
You can make a case for moving Horvat — a career Canuck who turns 28 in April — though it would be an unpopular move with fans.
An unsigned Horvat may not be the distraction that Miller would have been, but the longer this drags out, the more the pressure rises to get a deal done.
Follow Channels and Categories