[Buyout] Oliver Ekman-Larsson

[ilduce39]

I love that this buyout burns one of Arizona’s 3 contract retentions as well.  Those losers can kick rocks.

[ilduce39]

I don’t particularly want to go this route, but I wonder if there’s a path where we use our 1st and just go all in on improving the roster this year.

 

Maybe start with a trade-down with Chicago to offload Myers and create mega flexibility.

 

Then flip the 19OA to land Carlo and take a big run at Graves in FA.  Work a trade with Nashville to land Johansen for Garland.

Mikheyev-Petey-Kuzmenko

Beauvillier-Miller-Boeser

Hoglander-Johansen-Podkolzin

Joshua-Aman-Lucic

 

Hughes-Carlo

Graves-Hronek

Soucy-Bear (with one of Burroughs, Woo or Juulsen holding the fort until he’s healthy.)  

 

Demko

 

That’s kinda nice but a ton of moving parts. Probably still best just to hang on to the 11OA and, if anything, try and add some draft capital by taking back an overpaid C to kill 2 birds with one stone.

[24K PureCool]

3 hours ago, Master Mind said:

That's typically how it is.

 

Which is why there's always people fine with throwing away draft picks and prospects because that player would be at least 5 years away.

 

Pretty sure we'll have a team in 5 years, and now we're suffering from this mindset of short term trades from 5 or so years ago.

 

Hard to build a long term competitive team when the long term isn't considered.

What long term? It is 1 $2M dead cap in 8 years with rising cap if bought him out next year. Unless you want o advocate for riding his contract out which is way more detrimental to the team. That is equivalent to saying we give up for the next 4 years. 

 

It is not like the dead cap amount gonna change much if waited a year or two. Go look at the numbers. 

[Ghostsof1915]

Canucks Luck.

 

 

[Jaimito]

Drance: 8 thoughts on the Canucks’ decision to buy out Oliver Ekman-Larsson

The Vancouver Canucks took the dramatic step of buying out the four remaining seasons of Oliver Ekman-Larsson’s contract when the NHL’s first buyout window opened this past Friday.

It was a landmark decision, and the ramifications of this buyout will echo throughout the Canucks offseason and then be felt through the rest of this decade.

The buyout comes at the cost of a “dead money” cap hit remaining on Vancouver’s books through the 2031 campaign, but buying out Ekman-Larsson now saves the capped-out Canucks roughly $7.1 million against the salary cap for next season and nearly $14.5 million in actual cash over the next two seasons. It’s a move that probably had to happen. It was the best of a bad set of options facing Vancouver’s beleaguered NHL club.

The Ekman-Larsson buyout represents the culmination of a misguided two-year-old trade that we described at the time as a “franchise-defining risk”. We can now call it officially: the Canucks’ big roll of the dice on Ekman-Larsson in the summer of 2021 came up with snake eyes.

Turning the Ekman-Larsson buyout over and examining the cap ramifications over the past 48 hours, we wanted to dive deeper into what this decision tells us about the state of the club, what it means for the rest of the Canucks offseason and touch on a few other notable oddities and burnt ends from a seismic paper transaction.

Let’s get into it, with eight thoughts on the Canucks’ massive decision to buy out the Ekman-Larsson contract.

---

1. This is the biggest ordinary course buyout in NHL history

Some NHL buyouts have been more punitive from a salary cap perspective because of the front-loaded structure of the contract, like the Ryan Suter and Zach Parise buyouts in Minnesota.

Other compliance buyouts, like the Ilya Bryzgalov, Rick DiPietro, Brad Richards and Vincent Lecavalier buyouts, were bigger.

The Ekman-Larsson buyout is the biggest ordinary course buyout, however, in terms of the total value of the remaining contract, to ever hit a team’s cap sheet in the history of the NHL’s salary cap era.

The sheer scale, the pure salary cap carnage inherent in buying out the contract liability attached to Ekman-Larsson is incredible. It’s, in fact, historic.

2. The benefits of a proactive buyout

Even more than the historic size of the Ekman-Larsson buyout, what’s arguably most remarkable about this transaction is how hastily it went down.

Buyouts are usually a last resort, especially when they’re this big. Teams will jump through hoops, explore every nook and cranny to trade a problem contract before they buy it out. They’ll flirt at length with the notion of clearing cap space in other ways, before settling on exercising a buyout.

NHL teams typically bend over backwards to avoid having this much fixed, dead cap space on their books for a length of time as significant as eight years. For good reason.

When the Canucks cut bait with Ekman-Larsson on Friday, however, they moved swiftly.

According to The Athletic’s Rick Dhaliwal, the Canucks informed Ekman-Larsson’s camp of their decision on Friday morning, and then opted to pay the veteran left-handed defender two-thirds of the value of his deal over twice the remaining length of his contract.

 

 

The dynamic of this offseason: one final flat cap summer, and the probability of a significant lift in the upper limit in future seasons, were clearly weighed heavily in executing the Ekman-Larsson buyout. There’s added short-term benefit, however, to executing the buyout with such haste.

For sequencing reasons alone, it makes sense that Canucks hockey operations moved decisively here. Last week we were still estimating that the Canucks were effectively over the salary cap once Ethan Bear’s qualifying offer was included in our budgeting. Now, in the wake of Bear’s injury and the Ekman-Larsson buyout, the club should be considered to have somewhere in the range of $9.5-$10 million worth of cap flexibility to play with this summer. That makes a massive difference, especially this summer.

By buying out Ekman-Larsson on the opening of the buyout window, Allvin and company have maximized their runway ahead of the NHL Entry Draft to utilize this newfound cap savings on the trade market. That’s huge, because this is the time of year when the biggest, most transformative deals happen.

Right now, the next two weeks, is when having real cap flexibility matters most.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if this was the primary motivation guiding the Canucks to act as quickly as they did on an Ekman-Larsson buyout, but there’s one other possible explanation: that there’s another shoe to drop here.

Perhaps the club moved so quickly because they’ve got another move that’s close, but couldn’t be executed without first creating cap space with an Ekman-Larsson buyout…

3. The downside of a proactive buyout

While the Ekman-Larsson buyout was likely the club’s only realistic move in this instance, it certainly doesn’t seem like the club turned over every single stone in exploring other options.

It’s notable that the Ekman-Larsson camp told Dhaliwal they were “surprised” by the club’s decision to execute a buyout on Friday. That’s actually a crucial data point.

It strongly suggests that Canucks brass never went to Ekman-Larsson’s representative Kevin Epp of Titan Sports Management to dangle the club’s willingness to buy out his client’s contract as a negotiating threat.

Ekman-Larsson’s no-movement clause (NMC) will be cited as one of the main reasons why the Canucks were trapped here, why they had no other options. That’s true in some very real respects, but truthfully the club wasn’t entirely without leverage, at least, they weren’t if they were willing to take the step they did on Friday in buying out the contract.

NHL players don’t want to get bought out. They forfeit 33 percent of the guaranteed money of their contract when they are. As such, the possibility of a buyout could’ve been used to try and work around the veteran defender’s NMC in a potential trade. It could’ve at least started a conversation in which Ekman-Larsson’s agent could’ve become involved in a last-ditch attempt to find a trade with a rival NHL member club, although the price of such a deal would’ve been prohibitive from Vancouver’s perspective.

Now, it’s likely that taking this step would’ve been for naught anyway. In fact, Canucks hockey operations almost certainly made a judgement call that the juice of attempting to trade Ekman-Larsson’s contract wasn’t worth the squeeze in terms of the likelihood of success, the man hours required and the probable asset capital involved in such a maneuver. Not to mention the opportunity cost of waiting to free up cap space during a particularly active moment on the NHL’s transactional calendar.

That’s fair enough. More than anything, really, it’s suggestive of just how toxic the Ekman-Larsson commitment had come to be viewed internally.

4. The real long-term cost

Canucks fans were excited by the news on Friday, and one can understand why. In Vancouver, hockey fans have spent the past few months wondering whether their favourite team would have the space to make any offseason moves this summer.

After Friday’s buyout, the club suddenly has some meaningful, if limited flexibility. Even if the Canucks can’t move out additional cap space before July 1, they should be able to shop in prescribed fashion on both the trade and unrestricted free agent markets this summer.

Hope is so crucial to the experience of supporting a team. If nothing else, it’s exciting that this team is now positioned to do something to improve this summer.

That’s fine and good, but it shouldn’t obscure the gravity of what the Ekman-Larsson buyout means to the Canucks at this stage of their team-building cycle. Specifically, while there is real benefit to buying out Ekman-Larsson over the next two seasons, the Canucks have now committed to having over $9 million in dead cap space on the books across two absolutely crucial years in 2025-26 and 2026-27 (the buyout cap hit comes in at roughly $4.8 million in each of those seasons).

Those two seasons in 2025-26 and 2026-27 really loom large here. Consider it this way: the Ekman-Larsson buyout will be at its most punitive point when star netminder Thatcher Demko is in the final season of his contract and will require an extension, when Quinn Hughes is in the final two seasons of his sweetheart second contract and when Elias Pettersson is playing in his age 26 and 27 seasons.

Most of the attention and analysis has focused on the massive length of the buyout, and those four final seasons in which the Ekman-Larsson buyout will eat up a hair more than $2 million in cap space per year through 2031. The real long-term cost of this buyout, however, is that it meaningfully impinges on a two-year period that structurally looked to coincide with Vancouver’s cleanest contending window with this current core group.

The widely anticipated rise to the salary cap upper limit by then might blunt how sorely those two most onerous seasons of this buyout are felt, but it won’t blunt the disadvantage that dead money hit will represent relative to the NHL’s other teams in those seasons. A rising cap, after all, lifts all boats.

Even if the buyout was worth doing, and I believe it was, it’s worth being clear-eyed about the very real trade-offs associated with it.

5. The real long-term benefit

The total cap charge to the Canucks from the Ekman-Larsson buyout will exceed $20 million over the duration of the next eight seasons. The total real cost for Canucks ownership is in and around that same neighbourhood.

As tough as that is, there’s a real argument to be made that without even factoring in opportunity cost, the negative value of holding $20 million in dead money on the books over eight years is measurably less than the projected negative value of having Ekman-Larsson play out the remaining four years of his deal.

If we use Dom Luszczyszyn’s Net Rating model and look at Ekman-Larsson’s age curve, for example, it projects that Ekman-Larsson was likely to be worth an average of minus-$6.4 million in real value on a $7.26 million cap hit over the next four years:

Or, committing roughly $20 million in dead space over the next eight seasons represents a considerable saving in comparison with the minus-$25.6 million in value that Ekman-Larsson was projected to provide over the life of his now-bought-out contract.

6. How the buyout raises the stakes for the No. 11 pick

How the Minnesota Wild have navigated a far more extreme dead salary cap space situation stemming from a pair of arduous buyouts is an instructive case study from a Canucks perspective.

This is a Wild team that, this past season, bought draft picks by acting as a third-party broker in the midst of a 103-point season. This is a team that’s selected in the first two rounds of the NHL Entry Draft on 10 occasions across the last three NHL drafts, and owns the picks to do so three more times in the upcoming 2023 NHL Entry Draft. The Wild have also absolutely nailed it while identifying affordable, undervalued unrestricted free agents and trade targets, from Jacob Middleton and Jon Merrill, to Sam Steel and Frederick Gaudreau.

There’s a lesson here for Vancouver. The easiest way to navigate the cost of Ekman-Larsson’s buyout, particularly in those key 2025-26 and 2026-27 seasons, is to have some serious efficiencies on the roster. And while this Vancouver front office has shown some ability to identify Dakota Joshua-types, as Andrei Kuzmenko’s electric rookie year reminds us, the most dramatic, impactful cap efficiencies tend to come in the form of high-end players on entry-level contracts.

In the wake of the Ekman-Larsson buyout, then, it’s vital that the Canucks replicate their success shopping in the bargain bin in free agency, while also hitting at the draft table on a player or two that is ready to meaningfully contribute in two to three years time. You have to get very lucky to hit on a player like that outside the first round, but it’s a realistic expectation for the player selected by the Canucks with the 11th overall pick in Nashville in 10 days time.

It’s counterintuitive, but the Ekman-Larsson buyout serves to meaningfully raise the stakes of Vancouver’s first-round pick in Nashville. Getting a player capable of growing into an NHL contributor in the short-term is now essential for Vancouver’s amateur staff, and that also adds to the importance of the club actually making that pick, as opposed to trading down (or trading the pick for win-now help).

7. Can OEL bounce back?

Through and through, Ekman-Larsson is a pro. He played exceptional defensive hockey in his first Canucks season, before struggling considerably this year.

Ekman-Larsson was injured at the world championships last summer and often appeared to be labouring in games. His foot speed fell off dramatically. It would be one thing if Ekman-Larsson were getting burned out wide by the fastest NHL skaters, and while that occurred on occasion, more often this past season it seemed like he was struggling to keep up and even handle the puck at times. It looked from the press box like he was just a bit behind and couldn’t get to where he needed to be to execute the plays in his mind’s eye.

It can be tough for veteran players like Ekman-Larsson in a cruel, fast league like the NHL to catch up when they sustain significant lower-body injuries. The Chris Higgins example looms large in my mind here.

At the age of 31, Higgins was still a high-end two-way forward and an elite penalty killer who was still producing offence at a credible second-line rate at five-on-five. Entering his age 32 season, however, Higgins blocked a shot in Vancouver’s very first preseason game and broke his foot.

Higgins was a bright, hard-working player who kept himself in tip-top shape, but he never really caught up after that injury. On his return to the lineup, he struggled massively. The Canucks couldn’t find a taker for his contract after that, despite making him available by e-mail to everybody in the league. He was ultimately placed on waivers.

From being a crucial middle-six lynchpin, Higgins played just 33 NHL games over the balance of his career. A model of fitness and hard work, his abilities as an NHL player just never really came back.

One hopes Ekman-Larsson’s story has a different ending. This is a veteran player who just wants to play the game and you can bet he’ll be motivated this summer to prove that he’s still capable of being an impact player in the NHL.

If Ekman-Larsson can return to the form he showed in 2021-22, then he could potentially help a good team as a 4/5-type defender. He’ll have to bounce back significantly, however, to justify even an affordable contract and a minimal role on a contending team.

Obviously it didn’t work out for Ekman-Larsson in Vancouver, but he was always accountable, approachable and carried himself to the highest professional standard. At his peak in Arizona, he was one of the best two-way defenders in the sport.

I’ll certainly be rooting for him to show the hockey world that he’s still got some gas in the tank, even if I’d recommend caution to teams considering signing him to more than a one-year, show-me contract.

8. Exercising a buyout on OEL isn’t a win, using the cap space wisely could be

Buying out the Ekman-Larsson deal shouldn’t be seen as a win for the Canucks and their Jim Rutherford, Patrik Allvin-led hockey operations department.

Buyouts are rote, a built-in option for every standard player contract. Buying out a contract isn’t displaying ingenuity or creativity, it’s a paper transaction and while it takes real guts, it’s not evidence of strategic vision.

Moreover the fact pattern here isn’t suggestive of a club that struggled all that mightily against having to make this decision. Quite the opposite, actually. This isn’t like the Wild with Parise, where a trade to get off of that particular contract fell apart at the NHL trade deadline prior to the buyout.

The fact that Ekman-Larsson’s camp was surprised by the news on Friday actually suggests that there was at least one relatively obvious alternative route here that the club didn’t really explore.

Given the structure of the deal and how rapidly the cap benefit of buying out Ekman-Larsson diminished beyond this offseason, exercising a buyout on his contract was probably a necessary, regrettable decision. For now, that’s it.

The leverage of the cap space that the club has opened up with this transaction, particularly given that the space is opened up during one (hopefully) final flat cap offseason, is massive, however, and utilizing it wisely is now the whole ballgame for the Canucks this offseason. And for the next few offseasons as well.

Though the unrestricted free-agent crop is weak this summer, there are sure to be some intriguing options for buyers with cap flexibility in the weeks ahead. The Canucks have also done reasonably well to identify useful depth players affordably under new management and should lean into that strength in allocating this newfound cap flexibility.

Making future-forward moves that affordably improve the team short-term, that help this organization return to something approximating salary cap sanity, and that bolster the liquid assets (good players on inefficient deals, draft picks, prospects) that the club holds could make the Ekman-Larsson buyout the first step of a major win for the Canucks this offseason. We’re just not there yet.

Meanwhile there are some paths the club could chart through this offseason that could compound the pain of exercising this buyout, just as the original Ekman-Larsson deal compounded the misguided signings of Loui Eriksson, Antoine Roussel and Jay Beagle in the first place.

The key to this isn’t what the club has done yet. The key is what comes next.

(Photo: Derek Cain  / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

 

 

 

[ilduce39]

I like how Drance is highlighting the “proactive buyout” - we’ve done this quickly and decisively - and I’d assume it’s with a move or two already in mind. 
 

His “shoe to drop” comment might be speculation but I think he’s on to something.  I doubt we pushed this just to kinda see what will happen.

[dougieL]

7 hours ago, RWJC said:

Might be true, might not be.

Dont lose sight that JB was the one who worked that deal over two seasons under direction from ownership to bring in reinforcements in the “now”.

The Twins aren’t to blame in any capacity. Best bet is to contain it to the people who truly had the final say.
JB and Aquas. That’s the nucleus that really pulled the trigger.
No need to sully the rep of anyone else in the process. Here’s what Daniel had to say about OEL’s role back in 2021:

 

https://twitter.com/Sportsnet650/status/1418986589204754443/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1418986589204754443&currentTweetUser=Sportsnet650

@coryberg  Hey it wasn't me who posted that twitter link this time 

[dougieL]

7 hours ago, Kootenay Gold said:

Why on earth would you do that esp. at the TDL. Ride it out till the end of the season when he becomes a UFA. If they still want him after that, they can re-negotiate with his agent on both amount and term

I was answering someone's question.

[dougieL]

6 hours ago, iinatcc said:

Swedish people are very private people. Maybe the Sedins privately don't like OEL  but couldn't say it in public 

Maybe this is all part of the Sedins' diabolical plan: convince Benning to acquire OEL, pump OEL's tires, set the expectations sky-high, then watch him flame out horribly 

[johngould21]

56 minutes ago, ilduce39 said:

I don’t particularly want to go this route, but I wonder if there’s a path where we use our 1st and just go all in on improving the roster this year.

 

Maybe start with a trade-down with Chicago to offload Myers and create mega flexibility.

 

Then flip the 19OA to land Carlo and take a big run at Graves in FA.  Work a trade with Nashville to land Johansen for Garland.

Mikheyev-Petey-Kuzmenko

Beauvillier-Miller-Boeser

Hoglander-Johansen-Podkolzin

Joshua-Aman-Lucic

 

Hughes-Carlo

Graves-Hronek

Soucy-Bear (with one of Burroughs, Woo or Juulsen holding the fort until he’s healthy.)  

 

Demko

 

That’s kinda nice but a ton of moving parts. Probably still best just to hang on to the 11OA and, if anything, try and add some draft capital by taking back an overpaid C to kill 2 birds with one stone.

I want a lot more speed on that fourth line than Lucic brings. I think one or two of Boeser, Beau, and Hoglander will be gone too.

[dougieL]

6 hours ago, Gurn said:

Was last years decent play also the Sedin's fault, or do they just get the blame for, this bad season?

My apologies - Sedins get credit for one anomalously decent year of OEL, one horrendous year from OEL, and 8 years of dead cap of OEL.

[Jaimito]

13 minutes ago, ilduce39 said:

I like how Drance is highlighting the “proactive buyout” - we’ve done this quickly and decisively - and I’d assume it’s with a move or two already in mind. 
 

His “shoe to drop” comment might be speculation but I think he’s on to something.  I doubt we pushed this just to kinda see what will happen.

Yeah, that part caught my attention too. You would hope and expect the management already have a plan on who they are targeting, and have those plans in place. This isn't just a short sighted move to just under the cap. 

 

"...there’s one other possible explanation: that there’s another shoe to drop here.

Perhaps the club moved so quickly because they’ve got another move that’s close, but couldn’t be executed without first creating cap space with an Ekman-Larsson buyout."

[dougieL]

6 hours ago, Gawdzukes said:

No but like @iinatcc said these are younger guys who have been busy playing hockey their whole lives. I wouldn't expect them to all of the sudden be wizards at running a hockey team. Like any other player I'm sure they will learn if they are dedicated and put in the effort they usually do. Despite their endorsement and not seeing the big picture that's 100% on Benning for listening to two wet behind the ears people with zero management or hockey ops experience. Asking someone to comment on their friend's ability to do the job should always be taken with a grain of salt.

Yes, as I've always said, Benning rightfully receives the majority of the blame. But (at least according to Benning), the Sedins convinced him to add the second round pick that Arizona asked for in order to complete the deal because of how high they were on OEL. For them to be "wet behind the ears" and yet be so forceful in their endorsement is obviously irresponsible. It was also obviously irresponsible of Benning for taking their opinion into consideration.

 

All I'm saying are two things - the Sedins made a massive mistake in the evaluation of OEL as a hockey player, and they played some part in us acquiring him. I don't think these two statements are disputable.

[iinatcc]

23 minutes ago, dougieL said:

Maybe this is all part of the Sedins' diabolical plan: convince Benning to acquire OEL, pump OEL's tires, set the expectations sky-high, then watch him flame out horribly 

Such Sedinery ... a diabolical Sedinery 

Edited June 19, 2023 by iinatcc

[iinatcc]

15 minutes ago, dougieL said:

Yes, as I've always said, Benning rightfully receives the majority of the blame. But (at least according to Benning), the Sedins convinced him to add the second round pick that Arizona asked for in order to complete the deal because of how high they were on OEL. For them to be "wet behind the ears" and yet be so forceful in their endorsement is obviously irresponsible. It was also obviously irresponsible of Benning for taking their opinion into consideration.

 

All I'm saying are two things - the Sedins made a massive mistake in the evaluation of OEL as a hockey player, and they played some part in us acquiring him. I don't think these two statements are disputable.

I don't think there's such a thing as forceful endorsement though. 

[Pure961089]

Somewhere in an alternate reality.

 

Eliot Freidman is reporting that Jim Benning has been fired.  Replacing him with none other than....Mr. Magic 8 Ball!  Everyone seems to be pretty ecstatic with the VAST improvement of the possition moving forward. 

 Meet your new GM of the Vancouver Canucks.  He will be available to take questions from the media.

 

 

Edited June 19, 2023 by Pure961089

[dougieL]

2 minutes ago, iinatcc said:

I don't think there's such a thing as forceful endorsement though. 

You're right - thanks. I should have said something like "...so steadfast in their endorsement..."

[ilduce39]

2 minutes ago, johngould21 said:

I want a lot more speed on that fourth line than Lucic brings. I think one or two of Boeser, Beau, and Hoglander will be gone too.

Haha I got a little carried away adding Graves, Carlo and Johansen on adding size.  Probably too slow even without him.

[Pure961089]

The part of the buyout that hurts the most is is years 3 and 4 when this team is supposed to hit it's competitive peak. 

[dougieL]

4 minutes ago, Pure961089 said:

The part of the buyout that hurts the most is is years 3 and 4 when this team is supposed to hit it's competitive peak. 

Those are probably also the years that OEL's 7.26m will be an even bigger anchor than it already was.