The Canucks don't have much wiggle room so what moves can Mike Gillis make before the deadline?
Between injuries and a salary cap that's been crowding the Vancouver Canucks all season long; the impending trade deadline presents Canucks GM Mike Gillis with more questions than answers.
He roughly has room to acquire a $1 million player before Feb. 28, should he choose to do so. On Wednesday however, the twitter world had Gillis acquiring Ian White - and his $3 million cap hit - from Carolina.
"Where does this stuff come from?" mused Gillis moments after the "story" broke.
The bad scoop emanates from the recent rash of injuries among Vancouver's defence corps; a development that we can only assume will alter Gillis game plan heading into the Feb. 28.
"Won't know that until we find out a little bit more about the injured guys," Gillis said over his office phone Wednesday.
Of course, Gillis knows more than he's letting on. As he warms up, the information begins to flow a tad more freely.
"I don't know about (Dan) Hamhuis yet," he said. "We're getting very good news about him, but you know how these things go. It can be really positive one day, and then a guy might not play for months, like Willie Mitchell.
"(Keith) Ballard, we'll find out more over the course of the next 4-5 days."
Hamhuis (concussion) and Ballard (knee) were Gillis' two prime pick-ups last summer that were going to give Vancouver the blue-line depth that was absent during the past two playoff runs. Now they're both injured, along with Andrew Alberts, gone six to eight weeks with a broken wrist, Alex Edler (back surgery), and even Lee Sweatt (foot).
How does the GM of the NHL's top team deal with that?
"It probably doesn't cause me to rethink strategy," he said. "The fact is, we have to have space to get guys back into our line-up after the trade deadline. We may not have space to make any deals."
Here is Vancouver's salary cap predicament: They can't trade draft picks for reinforcements on defence, because the cap space used up by the new players could conceivably make it impossible to bring Hamhuis or Ballard back on to the active roster before the end of the regular season.
If a player is healthy, say, on Apr. 1, and the team can't fit them under the cap until season's end, it is conceivable that player would be deemed ineligible for the playoffs.
Now, Edler and Alberts are different stories. They are both on Long Term Injured Reserve and not back until the playoffs - when there is no salary cap. That frees up what's left of their combined $4.3 million cap - minus the recently-added Sami Salo's salary of $3.5 million - for Gillis to add a player with a salary in the $1 million range.
The National Hockey League is vigilant about teams who hide players on the injury list until the cap is lifted come playoff time. The league - and Vancouver's first-round opponent - will require stiff medical evidence that Ballard's knee would not let him play before Apr. 15, if the Canucks attempt to bring him back for Game 1 of the playoffs. Same with Hamhuis.
Edler and Alberts are easier sells to miss the remainder of the regular season, because of the severity of their injuries. So Gillis has a few dollars to play with at the deadline. But any major moves would have to be money-in, money-out - and he's not wild about trading a roster player.
"I don't know why we would," he reasons. "We're in first place, and we've lost maybe the most man games of any team in the league. I can't see a circumstance where we're trading a player off our roster at this point in time.
"Besides, this is warming up to be a different type of trade deadline than people are accustomed to. I think there are fewer buyers than people think. The teams out there making deals are trying to capitalize much earlier, because there is very little money in the system."
Wealthy contenders like Vancouver are right up against the cap, while most teams with cap space have reached their allotted budget. Under the cap, the trading deadline has become an opportunity merely to tweak, not to build.
"We built our team in the summer for that very reason," Gillis said. "The trade deadline is too unpredictable. You overpay. Look at the analysis over past 10 years of deadline deals: maybe 1% of them have had a discernable effect at the outcome of the Stanley Cup."
Would he deal backup goalie Cory Schneider, who makes $900,000? "He's a huge part of our team," said Gillis, who has heard a lot of theories about how he needs to acquire some fourth-line grit.
A Jarkko Ruutu-type player.
"Finding those guys who can play and actually contribute to your team is difficult," he said. "I just continue to look at Detroit, who I refer to as the gold standard in this league for last 15 years at least.
"Rather than looking to be more - what's the word? - truculent, (Red Wings GM) Kenny Holland just sits there with Darren Helm and Jiri Hudler on his fourth line. I know Jiri Hudler puts the fear of God into me, just mentioning his name.
"You're in first place in the league, and you're supposed to go out and find someone to make sure Milan Michalek doesn't slew foot Keith Ballard?"
The way it looks, count on Gillis to settle for a depth defenceman, the way he picked up Alberts at last year's deadline.
