Jack Roslovic's waiting game may have cost him potential contract offer

Free agent Jack Roslovic’s waiting game may have cost him a potential contract offer from one team. The Canucks have “cooled off on pursuing” the top remaining UFA, writes The Athletic’s Thomas Drance.

There were talks between the Canucks and Roslovic’s camp last month, Rick Dhaliwal of CHEK and The Athletic said at the time, leaving them as one of a small list of confirmed suitors. It wasn’t without precedent, either. Vancouver had approached Roslovic last summer as well, before he ended up taking a one-year, $2.8M contract with the Hurricanes.

That deal saw him tie his career-high of 22 goals in 81 games while also seeing more time at center than he did in 2023-24, likely sparking some optimism that he could help fill out the Canucks’ underwhelming depth down the middle. Nonetheless, it appears Vancouver’s braintrust has now pivoted to only pursuing long-term solutions to supplement anchor Elias Pettersson and, ideally, injury-prone but high-ceiling Filip Chytil in a top-nine role.

“Vancouver is still in the market to land a centre, but the trade market is viewed as a more likely and realistic route of addressing the club’s greatest remaining need,” Drance said. “Vancouver would execute a trade today if the deal returned a credible middle-six centre — even if that centre had more of a defensive bent to their game.”

The Canucks still have $3.27M in cap space left to facilitate a deal, per PuckPedia.

As for Roslovic, he’s getting into crunch time with only one-year deals and PTOs available for most everyone at this point of the offseason. Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman reported in early August that there were five teams with legitimate interest in him but that he was taking his time to make a decision.

Even with that intrigue and proven top-nine capability without much risk of regression — he’s still just 28 — a multiyear pact may simply be out of reach for him at this point. At the beginning of the summer, AFP Analytics projected him to receive a three-year deal worth north of $4M per season. With the way the market has broken, though, he might need to settle for another one-year deal at a comparable value to last year’s $2.8M cap hit.