After the biggest move of the offseason, General Manager Patrik Allvin spoke to the media on Wednesday afternoon.
It was the first time we were able to hear Allvin’s thoughts on the Vancouver Canucks buying out Oliver Ekman-Larsson, which Allvin called a difficult decision given the significance of the dollars involved. He mentioned that he is, “not a big fan of buyouts” but that in this particular case, his team felt that it was an opportunity that was too good to pass up.
We’ve covered the OEL buyout enough, so we won’t dive too deep into the money but just for reference, here’s how the cap hit breaks down.
This gives the team plenty of flexibility for the 2023-24 season and Allvin seemed much more loose on Wednesday when he spoke about his team’s current cap situation. The dark cloud that was OEL’s cap hit is almost non-existent next season and that gives the Canucks the best chance to be competitive next year.
As for the conversations with ownership about the buyout, Allvin spoke about the Aquilini family’s commitment to bringing a championship to Vancouver.
“The discussion between Jim Rutherford, ownership and myself here — I think this just shows how committed ownership and the Aquilini family are to bring a championship team here to the city of Vancouver,” said Allvin.
Now that Allvin has the flexibility, he spoke about how he is going to approach the newly acquired cap space.
“My goal is just not to create cap space, our goal is to improve our hockey team,” said Allvin. “This definitely gives us a chance to improve our team by creating this cap flexibility here. So we have a process in place here where we had meetings with the pro staff and analytics staff and looking [at] what areas we can improve our team and a constant conversation with the coaching staff as well [about] how we want to play and what players that might fit into how we’re going improve our team for next year.”
Allvin also spoke about how the situation of the actual buyout went down.
“I dealt with his agent first,” said Allvin. “Oliver is a very classy person. I have a lot of respect for him as a person and what he brings here and brought here for the two years when he was here. Sometimes it’s just not a great fit when trades happen and this team wasn’t a great fit for Oliver coming in here. I don’t know what his expectations were. I know it’s been tough playing for two different coaches and it was just the right time for us to move on.”
There wasn’t much said of note from Allvin in Wednesday’s media availability. He spoke a bit about the draft, about the injury updates to Tanner Pearson and Ethan Bear, while also mentioning the current point of discussions with Elias Pettersson and his agent about a contract extension.
We will have all of that covered in the next 24 hours here at CanucksArmy.
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