NHL trades: Canucks stand pat at deadline, keep Brock Boeser

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In the end, Brock Boeser remained a Vancouver Canuck.

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Despite him being a pending unrestricted free agent and there being minimal contract talks between the Canucks and Boeser, the NHL team ended up not moving him.

Boeser was one of the top players available on the trade market, but moving him would have left the still playoff-hopeful Canucks down a pretty good scoring winger.

And that desire to play both ends of the situation seems to have left them in stasis.

Boeser is a very good player. But he’s also 28. And his foot speed is only going to be a bigger concern.

The Canucks are now down a centre after trading J.T. Miller and they are looking at the possibility of losing Boeser for nothing this summer. He stood firm in his contract demands and so did the Canucks. Of course they could yet bridge that gap but this feels like a treading water deadline.

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The Canucks do have cap space to work with, so you’d expect they’d fill that in this summer, but this is a hard way to live.

Constantly trying to integrate free agents is hard: just look at how badly this season has gone. If this team is going to be a contender, there’s just so much work to do on the top end of the line.

The team has reset their defence corps and they’re feeling confident about that, but they need to take some big swings.

Patrik Allvin is set to speak soon so we’ll update this story with answers, hopefully, later.

More to come…

pjohnston@postmedia.com

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