Jake Guentzel’s pending free agency could lead him to the West Coast. The Hurricanes left winger has yielded strong interest from the Canucks, Daily Faceoff’s Frank Seravalli reports.
They’re expected to make a “strong play” for his services amid likely interest from the Capitals, Panthers, Maple Leafs and Rangers, said Seravalli.
An extension in Carolina doesn’t appear to be in the cards for Guentzel, and his signing rights have been made available for trade for teams to get an inside track on a deal before July 1. He’ll have plenty of suitors after drawing a similar level of attention at the trade deadline a few months ago.
Guentzel is nearing the end of a five-year, $30M extension he signed with the Penguins in December 2018, midway through a breakout campaign that saw him hit the 40-goal and 75-point marks for the first time.
His $6M cap hit has since served as a bargain for Pittsburgh as he continued flourishing on Sidney Crosby’s wing, averaging just north of a point per game over the life of his extension.
With the Penguins struggling to stay in the playoff race this season, though, they dealt him to Carolina at the deadline to avoid losing him for nothing this summer — a fate the Hurricanes are also trying to avoid by recouping at least some value for his signing rights.
An upper-body injury limited him to 67 games this season, but it didn’t stop him from having the best offensive campaign of his career on a per-game basis. He finished the season with a sparkling eight goals and 25 points in 17 games for the Canes, bringing his season average up to 1.15 points per game. Only 14 players in the league had more.
In all likelihood, he’ll land a max-term contract this summer, whether it’s a seven-year deal on the open market or an eight-year extension with a team that acquires his signing rights.
At age 29, he likely won’t get the chance for another big payday. Seravalli believes his cap hit should come in around $9.5M per season, close to what we’ll predict on our Top 50 Unrestricted Free Agents list dropping next week.
That’s something the Canucks can stomach at first glance with $24.078M in projected cap space next season, which jumps to $26.578M if you account for defenseman Tucker Poolman’s likely long-term injured reserve placement, per CapFriendly.
But like the team he’s parting ways with in Raleigh, Vancouver has a large slate of pending free agents to re-sign or part ways with. As Seravalli points out, signing Guentzel almost surely means letting Dakota Joshua and Elias Lindholm hit the open market. It also means pawning off most or all of Ilya Mikheyev’s $4.75M cap hit in a trade and making other tough decisions with a defense group that includes Filip Hronek, Tyler Myers and Nikita Zadorov.
Guentzel does seem to fit like a glove in Vancouver’s lineup, though. Arguably its biggest weakness in its breakout 2023-24 campaign was a lack of support for budding superstar center Elias Pettersson, who spent most of the season with depth wingers Nils Hoglander, Sam Lafferty and Mikheyev as his linemates.
Getting a player with a lengthy history of meshing well with star centers could do wonders for the 25-year-old Swede as he kicks off his massive eight-year, $92.8M extension.
It’s not as if there’s no history between Guentzel and Vancouver, either. Canucks president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford was the one who signed Guentzel’s current deal as GM of the Penguins, and the club was one of the finalists for his services at the deadline in March.
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