Price is Right: Will Luke Schenn return to Canucks as free agent this summer?

Sometimes you just can’t stay away from a place you love. Find a great vacation spot somewhere, you might have more than one holiday in the same location. But would you make a point of living and working in the same spot a few different times, a spot that isn’t actually your birthplace or childhood home?

Not many would have that on the resume, but with a signing this summer, Luke Schenn would enter a very exclusive club. The three-stinter club. I don’t have any exact numbers on this, but I do know the names that normally come up.

David Perron with the Blues, Francois Beauchemin with the Ducks, Benoit Hogue with the Stars, plus Wendel Clark and Yanic Perreault with the Leafs. Patrick Marleau with the Sharks is also a weird one — just eight games with the Penguins separates his second stint with his retirement year in San Jose. That’s not the entire list, but it is a short one.

The Canucks have had a coach come back three times in Newell Brown.

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Canucks president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford did it, as a player, but for the Montreal Canadiens. And his third stint was merely the last start of his career, 60 minutes, just to say he did it.

But the only Canuck to have three separate stints is defenceman Nolan Baumgartner. But as a guy who only played 143 NHL games, it wasn’t terribly consequential, he wasn’t a full-time player either.

Schenn, however, could very well pull it off. And if it’s a short enough contract signed, he could very well make history as the first two-time, three-timer. Imagine Schenn signs a two-year deal with the Canucks in the summer. Then at the first or second trade deadline in that deal, gets dealt back to Toronto. Are you telling me the Leafs won’t kick tires again before a playoff run?

This is the sort of storyline we used to get on the back of a hockey card, but now, you’ll only get here. And hey, there is very low likelihood of the Canucks making a playoff run next year, we need something else to focus on. Make it a three-timer.