Welcome Matt: Miller contract draws parallels to past Canucks management
For nine months, the Vancouver Canucks’ new management team talked about clearing cap space.
On Friday, they went about committing more of it.
Quite a turnabout for president Jim Rutherford and general manager Patrik Allvin, and you’re right to wonder where all of this is coming from.
More on that in a moment.
But when they failed to trade J.T. Miller at the deadline, they set about a new course, call it Plan B.
It was more difficult than they anticipated to move Miller in the summer, both at the draft and in the weeks that followed, as that secondary window Rutherford predicted never materialized.
They misread the market — how difficult it was to move money out — and that brought them back to Miller with decreased leverage, especially when rumblings started that his agent would end extension talks come the regular season, willing to risk injury or underperformance. The Canucks clearly weren’t willing to take a similar risk.
That put the Canucks under a deadline, and it very much looks like they treated the beginning of camp — as much as the Oct. 12 opener against Edmonton — as a deadline.
It seems the Canucks didn’t want a distraction come camp, and it does seem that this management group is still a little skittish of fan and media reaction, given the number of late-Friday and weekend/holiday press releases this summer.
But I don’t believe you can simply chalk this up to managing scared, and mortgaging their own part of the future on top of the mortgages that the previous regime took out on Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Connor Garland and others.
This very much looks like the hand of ownership, and trying to be playoff and Cup competitive ASAP.
Be that because of chairman Francesco Aquilini’s desire for postseason revenues or because of the family’s aged patriarch. But the common bond between the Jim Benning and Jim Rutherford regimes is now a doubling down on a core that has not proven it is worthy.
This extension robs from the available cap dollars next year, where the Canucks already have $69 million committed, while requiring them to fix the defence sooner rather than later in order to facilitate competitiveness while Miller is still a star player, and while the rest of the core is in its prime.
You can argue that this management team adapted, showed flexibility after the market scuttled their best laid plans. But you can also argue the walls closed in on them, and they were left with few options other than retaining the player and avoiding a scenario where they had to trade him and possibly while in a postseason chase.
Rutherford told Rick Dhaliwal on Friday that they will figure out the cap next summer, an ominous statement for Canuck Nation that is now accustomed to kicking problems down the road.