Drance: Why the Tanner Pearson trade is a failure of prioritization

It’s rare that an NHL trade is both fair and deeply troubling at the same time.

On Tuesday, however, we saw such a deal when the Vancouver Canucks sent Tanner Pearson and a 2025 third-round pick to the Montreal Canadiens in a trade that returned a decent backup goalie in Casey DeSmith.

It’s a minor trade on the face of it, one that carves out some slight but meaningful cap relief for a club that needed it in advance of the season.

Tanner Pearson’s last game for the Canucks was played 10 months ago, in early November of 2022. He sustained a wrist injury in that game, a three-week injury which required surgery.

Pearson seemed to be on track to return and practiced with the club in Vegas a couple of weeks later. Then came news of a setback: Pearson’s absence became extended. Quinn Hughes suggested publicly that the injury hadn’t been handled correctly, leading to the extended recovery time that Pearson dealt with — a recovery that included a multitude of additional surgeries to repair the wrist and deal with an infection.

The veteran forward, a Stanley Cup winner who conducted himself with the utmost professionalism throughout his Canucks tenure, was bound for a bottom-six role in Vancouver this season. In fact, given the surplus bodies Vancouver has on the wings and his $3.25 million cap hit, it seemed probable Pearson was at risk of being cut from the lineup and placed on waivers had he remained with the Canucks.

Trading Pearson, a well-liked teammate, isn’t likely to have gone over well in the Canucks locker room. Cutting him at the end of training camp, however, would’ve been a lead balloon on the eve of a vital season for this team.

That’s a hypothetical that will never get tested, of course. On Tuesday afternoon the club found another solution, and it’s most likely a positive one for both sides.

In Montreal, Pearson is likely to find a bigger role in a key contract year. He’ll be able to mentor a younger side in the Eastern Conference, and put the drama and controversy of last season behind him.

If Pearson performs well — like Canadiens centre Sean Monahan did prior to sustaining an injury last season — and re-establishes his value as a hard-nosed middle-six winger with championship experience, Pearson could even return value to the Canadiens at the trade deadline, and earn a chance to compete for another Cup.

The Canucks, meanwhile, bring in DeSmith, an NHL veteran. As a collegiate player, DeSmith was dismissed by the University of New Hampshire’s hockey team in 2014 when he was arrested, accused of domestic violence and eventually charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. (DeSmith eventually pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. He was never permitted to resume his NCAA playing career.) DeSmith is familiar to Canucks head coach Rick Tocchet and Canucks hockey operations leadership from their time with the Pittsburgh Penguins organization.

DeSmith, 32, is coming off of a down season with the Penguins and has been traded multiple times this summer, but for his career he’s been a reliable — even occasionally a high-end — backup option over 105 career NHL starts.

Importantly, plugging in DeSmith’s expiring contract for Pearson’s expiring contract also saves Vancouver roughly $1.45 million in total cap space and about $850k in total salary. Those savings will permit the Canucks to — barring further injuries — carry a full 23-man roster without having to re-assign a high-salaried veteran to the American League, assuming Ilya Mikheyev either begins the season as a full participant or on long-term injured reserve.

If Mikheyev begins the season on injured reserve, I project, based on salary-cap data sourced from CapFriendly, that the Canucks will have the cap space to carry 22 players on their 23-man roster to open the year.

Beyond the subtle but substantive cap benefits of this deal for Vancouver, DeSmith gives Vancouver another option in net. This was an area in which the club was worrying shallow prior to Tuesday afternoon.

Thatcher Demko is an excellent puck-stopper and occasionally a dominant one. In his two seasons as Vancouver’s workhorse starter, however, he’s been injured at some point during each campaign.

A lack of reliable goaltending depth killed the Canucks last season when Demko was injured. Thrust into high usage, Spencer Martin and Colin Delia were unable to hold the fort behind one of the most permissive defensive teams in the sport, and the Canucks’ team save percentage sagged well below .900.

Entering this season, the club was poised to cobble together backup starts between Martin, who lost his backup job to Delia as last season went along but found his footing in the American League late in the season, and 22-year-old Latvian phenom Artūrs Šilovs, who has only appeared in three career NHL games.

Now it’s possible that one, or both, of Martin and Šilovs could’ve made that work in a pinch.

Martin has been reliable in the NHL previously. Šilovs is exceptionally talented. And the team’s improved defensive play under Tocchet — assuming their late-season form carries over into this year — should provide for a more survivable environment for Canucks goaltenders than whatever the team was doing defensively last season.

Despite that upside case, entering the year with Martin and Šilovs as the team’s lone Demko insurance policies in net was a significant risk. The potential downside — if Martin’s form regressed, or Šilovs proved unready — was enormous, as we witnessed last season.

The DeSmith acquisition gives the Canucks an important and newfound floor in net. Of course, he could struggle significantly if called upon too, but he’s another goaltender — and one with meaningful NHL experience — to throw at the twin problems of spelling Demko frequently enough to keep him fresh throughout the regular season and providing Vancouver with a reliable insurance policy in the event Demko has to miss an extended stretch at any point this season.

Essentially this is a fair-value trade that arguably sees the club do right by a veteran player, frees up some cap flexibility and addresses the team’s most glaring area of need on the eve of the regular season.

So, why is this trade so troubling? The key here is to zoom out. The tree itself might be gorgeous, but if you examine the forest, it’s clear that it’s rotting.

On the micro scale of this one single, individual trade, it’s a sensible — or at least a defensible — deal. Big picture, it’s evidence of an organization’s continued failure to prioritize, prudently manage cap space and make responsible choices.

Let’s attempt to rewind and consider the full picture here. We won’t go all the way back to the age-gap trade era or the past decade of darkness that has so often been defined by this club’s win-now desperation, but let’s at least consider this calendar year as context.

Having added Mikheyev at $4.75 million per season on a four-year deal, settled with restricted free agent Brock Boeser on a three-year deal worth $6.65 million per and committed to J.T. Miller at $8 million per season over seven years last summer, Vancouver entered last season and performed poorly.

In the leadup to the trade deadline, Canucks management traded Bo Horvat to the New York Islanders and targeted solid middle-six winger Anthony Beauvillier and his non-expiring $4.15 million contract as a key part of the return, in addition to a first-round pick and intriguing prospect Aatu Räty. Beauvillier is a good player, but by taking back his non-expiring deal, the club mitigated the cap benefit of ducking Horvat’s upcoming extension in the short term.

That same week, the club also extended Andrei Kuzmenko with a cap hit of $5.5 million on a two-year contract. Kuzmenko was a star performer in the NHL in his first season, and might be a star-level performer outright if he can repeat that level of performance. Having added $12.75 million in long-term commitments to Miller and Mikheyev the previous summer, the club had now committed an additional $9.65 million to a pair of wingers for this upcoming season.

Closer to the trade deadline itself, the team pruned some long-term commitments from the books, trading Riley Stillman and Curtis Lazar, who carried small cap liabilities of less than $1.5 million into the 2023-24 campaign. They also added 25-year-old puck-moving defender Filip Hronek at $4.4 million to the books. Hronek, a pending restricted free agent with arbitration rights after this season, will be due a substantial raise beyond this year.

Put it all together and the Jim Rutherford, Patrik Allvin-led Canucks hockey operations group added nearly $12 million in salary-cap commitments for this upcoming season between Jan. 1 and the trade deadline, which in addition to the commitments made to Boeser, Miller and Mikheyev the previous summer, put the team effectively over the salary cap as the offseason began.

Despite their salary-cap positioning, the team had urgent needs. A backup goalie, a defenseman (or two) and bottom-six centre depth were clear areas the club had to address.

Unable to move a high-salaried veteran player, the team bought out Oliver Ekman-Larsson. It was and remains the biggest ordinary course buyout in the history of the NHL’s hard cap era. In future seasons — particularly for a two-year window beginning in 2025-26 — that buyout will inhibit this club’s ability to improve.

The team also non-tendered Ethan Bear, who was injured at the World Championship. That decision, in combination with the Ekman-Larsson buyout, gave the team roughly $9 million in cap space with which to spend as free agency began.

When the market opened, the team signed fourth-line centre Teddy Blueger and a pair of sturdy, versatile 4/5 defensemen in Carson Soucy and Ian Cole. The total cap bill of those moves, which were uniformly short-term, came in at $8.15 million. The Canucks later added middle-six forward Pius Suter in August on a value two-year contract that carries a $1.6 million cap hit.

In the hard-capped NHL, the league essentially functions as an efficiency contest within a scarce resource environment. The scarcest resource is cap space, the second scarcest is star-level talent. Depth contributors matter immensely, particularly if they’re both very good and very affordable under the cap, but they’re way down the order of team priorities.

This offseason, because of the choices management previously made, Vancouver exercised a massive buyout, one with long-term cap ramifications, and used that newfound salary-cap space to exclusively add depth contributors.

It still wasn’t enough. On Tuesday, the team, despite having executed the largest ordinary course buyout in NHL history, still needed — for the second consecutive season — to part with an additional future asset to address a glaring area of short-term organizational need and gain some additional cap flexibility.

The Pearson-and-a-pick-for-DeSmith deal may be sensible in a vacuum, but in context, for this team, it’s just another example of extraordinary salary-cap imprudence. Another example of a misguided team bleeding incremental future value — a little bit of dead cap space here, a medium-term contract for a depth contributor there, another mid-round pick traded for good measure — in the service of propping up the short-term health of a team that isn’t a credible contender to win the Stanley Cup.

There is a very real chance these moves pay off, or at least are popularly seen to have paid off. Given the talent level of their top players, Vancouver could absolutely make the playoffs this year. The implied odds at the Vegas sports books suggest they have a roughly 40-43 percent chance.

It’s going to take more than a one-off playoff berth, however, to justify the club continuing to operate in such a short-sighted, unsustainable manner.

The Canucks need some of the bets they’ve placed — the Hronek trade, the Kuzmenko and Miller extensions — to produce star-level players, who maintain that star-level form year after year, particularly during the most punitive stretch of the Ekman-Larsson buyout. They need their stable of NCAA free agents to generate a pipeline of affordable labour to offset years of lost draft picks. They absolutely need to get Elias Pettersson’s autograph on a shiny new long-term standard player contract before he hits unrestricted free agency.

Threading that needle is going to be excruciatingly difficult, partly because this team has consistently made moves like Tuesday’s Pearson trade. Moves that seem sensible when viewed in isolation, but prioritize the short term fruitlessly.

These are the deals that, made in bulk over the past decade, have slowly but surely lowered the ceiling of what this team might be in the present. That they’re still happening troublingly suggests this cycle isn’t broken and may continue unabated into the future.

(Top photo of Tanner Pearson: Jeff Vinnick / NHLI via Getty Images)