Canucks buy out Oliver Ekman-Larsson

The Vancouver Canucks are buying out Oliver Ekman-Larsson.

Friday was the first day of a two-week window NHL teams could buy out players this season.

Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman was the first to report the news Friday afternoon, about an hour before the Canucks announced the news themselves.

“We would like to thank Oliver for the time he spent in Vancouver,” Canucks GM Patrik Allvin in a statement.

“The business of hockey is very complex and tough decisions have to be made if you want to remain competitive. Buying out Oliver gives us a lot more flexibility and cap space the next couple of years and significantly reduces his hit in the subsequent seasons. It is our expectation that following this year, the cap will also raise considerably making this the right time to execute this buyout. Our organization is committed to do whatever it needs to do to improve, get better on and off the ice, and move forward in a positive direction.”

Ekman-Larsson’s agent Kevin Epp told Postmedia he and his client were totally surprised by the Canucks’s decision and that they were informed Friday morning.

The buyout came as something of a surprise to outside observers as weel, as Allvin indicated at the end of the 2022-23 season he wasn’t inclined toward a buyout, even though Ekman-Larsson’s season was a disaster.

“I don’t want to use buyouts that are going to affect us in a couple of years when this group is actually, hopefully taking off,” Allvin said.

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Coach Rick Tocchet spoke as if Ekman-Larsson — whom he had also coached in Arizona — would be back next year.

“I know a lot of people count him out. I got a feeling that he’s going to have a really good year. There’s a there’s a gleam in his eye,” Tocchet said.

Canucks players Conor Garland, Quinn Hughes, Oliver Ekman-Larsson andThatcher Demko (left to right) at the final media availability of the 2022-23 NHL season on April 15, 2023 at Rogers Arena. Photo by Patrick Johnston /PNG files

Buying out Ekman-Larsson’s contract, which has four years remaining, will alleviate the Canucks’ cap pressures in the short term, but also means a cap hit related to the former star defenceman remaining on the books for eight years.

Just on the contracts they were currently committed to for next season, the Canucks were set to be over the salary cap, the only team in the NHL to be in such a position. And they still needed to add three or four bodies to the roster, just to ice an NHL lineup.

As it stands, the Canucks are now about $4 million below the salary cap.

Because Ekman-Larsson is older than 26, he’ll have two-thirds of the remaining cash owed on his deal paid out. The Arizona Coyotes will pay a portion of the deal, as they agreed to retain part of his salary when they traded him to the Canucks two summers ago.

There was $29 million remaining in Ekman-Larsson’s deal, so a two-thirds buyout costs $19,333,333, a savings of $9,666,667.

Buying out Ekman-Larsson’s deal this summer minimizes the long-term impact. The Canucks will have cap savings of nearly $8 million for this coming season compared to keeping him on the books. And while the per-year cost would have been slightly reduced if they had bought him out next year, with the cap expected to start increasing again next year, this additional cost — around $300,000 per season — will be relatively minimal.

But it isn’t a free cost. The Canucks will have a minimal penalty charged against their cap next season — $146,667 — but that charge increases to $2,346,667 in 2024-25 and then again to $4,766,667 for 2025-26 and 2026-27, then down to $2,126,667 over the remaining four years of the cap penalty.

It’s difficult to ignore what the massive savings of this buyout creates for the Canucks for the 2023-24 season. The team has set the playoffs as the bar this year and this gives them some cap room to work with to further reshape the roster.

Trading for Ekman-Larsson was an expensive proposition for Allvin’s predecessor Jim Benning. He got out from under a trio of bad contracts he’d signed, moving Antoine Roussel, Jay Beagle and Loui Eriksson — who were all in the last years of their contracts — to Arizona, but he also dealt the Canucks’ first round pick in 2021, which was softened by the additional acquisition of Conor Garland. The Canucks also shipped out a pair of lower-round draft picks, including their seventh-round pick in this month’s NHL entry draft.

Benning had hoped that Ekman-Larsson, who was considered one of the best defencemen in the NHL, would be the Canucks’ No. 1 defenceman for several years. His first season in Vancouver was solid, though unspectacular.

But he also didn’t prove to be the immediate boost to the roster Benning and head coach Travis Green had hoped for and the Canucks struggled out of the gate in 2021-22, which led to the firings of both Benning and Green in early December 2021.

This past season Ekman-Larsson was a shadow of his past self. He struggled to defend and his skating was notably diminished.

He said after the season that he had struggled to recover from a broken foot suffered in May 2022 at the IIHF World Championships and that once the season started he never got back up to speed. His season was terrible, he acknowledged.

Seven players were bought out during last summer’s window: Ottawa’s Colin White and Michael Del Zotto, Chicago’s Brett Connolly and Henrik Borgstrom, New Jersey’s Janne Kuokkanen, Philadelphia’s Oskar Lindblom and San Jose’s Rudolfs Balcers.

All but White had just one year remaining on their deals. White had three years remaining.

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