How Canucks incur subtle costs by offloading Anthony Beauvillier to depleted Blackhawks

April 25, 2024

Over the past five days the Chicago Blackhawks have confused the hockey world with their lack of transparency and weathered malicious rumours, all the while losing two wingers off their roster.

Taylor Hall is set to undergo season-ending ACL surgery, the club announced this past Thursday. Corey Perry was placed on waivers and his contract will be terminated as a result of “unacceptable” workplace conduct.

It’s within that context that the Canucks were able to offload Anthony Beauvillier to the Blackhawks in exchange for a 2024 fifth-round draft pick. The Blackhawks need credible NHL bodies on the wings, and Beauvillier is certainly that, if not much more.

For Chicago, Beauvillier gives the Blackhawks some reliable reinforcements, another hard-working forward so that the club can continue to play structurally sound hockey with a limited roster in Connor Bedard’s rookie campaign.

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For Vancouver, shedding Beauvillier’s $4.15 million cap hit opens up some meaningful flexibility so that the surprising club — off to the best start in franchise history — can get creative in upgrading its blue line, or, in more typical Jim Rutherford style, attempt to add a real impact player in the months ahead.

There’s a sense of opportunism on the Canucks’ end in executing this trade, particularly given the timing of it. It certainly seems like Canucks management threw the Blackhawks an anvil given how depleted their middle-six wing depth became over the course of this week, and Chicago said yes.

That’s a micro win for Vancouver. A sensible move in isolation, one that sets up a straightforward path to improving the team on the trade market.

As we’ve so often seen from this Canucks management team, however, there are hidden big-picture costs to this deal that make a fair analysis of it a little bit more complicated.

Beauvillier, after all, didn’t really work out for the Canucks. Billed rather preposterously as the equivalent of a first-round pick the day he was acquired as part of the Bo Horvat trade, Beauvillier was in fact a salary cap throw-in, in that deal. He found his groove on the top line for the club down the stretch, as Vancouver got hot and picked away at its lottery odds, but found himself marginalized this season. As the club has stormed through the league in the first 22 games, Beauvillier has been a fourth-line fixture, only occasionally jumping further up the lineup for defensive reasons.

It’s easy to suggest that the Canucks simply added a fifth-round pick to their haul for Horvat, but the truth is more complicated. After all, having $4.15 million in additional cap flexibility today is good, but having that $4.15 million in additional cap flexibility in the summer is far, far better.

In the contemporary NHL, not all cap space is created equal. In the summer, cap flexibility is far more valuable than it is in November, because in the summer there are more valuable assets that teams are able to absorb into that space without paying any additional acquisition cost. Perhaps the Canucks can revisit things with unrestricted free agent defenseman Ethan Bear — who is rehabbing in Kelowna, B.C., as he heals from a shoulder injury sustained at the World Championships this past summer — but otherwise, Vancouver is going to have to pay to play on the trade market in order to upgrade its roster using the $4.15 million of space the Canucks shed on Tuesday.

That’s the sneaky opportunity cost incurred by the club in effectively renting Beauvillier for nine months. Holding him through this summer effectively closed off other avenues for improvement that the team might’ve been able to consider otherwise.

And that opportunity is doubly steep for a team that exercised the largest ordinary course buyout in the NHL’s hard cap era, in part necessitated by salary cap commitments — Beauvillier’s and Filip Hronek’s — that the club added at the deadline.

That’s why a fair assessment of this opportunistic, sensible Canucks trade requires us to dig a bit deeper to fairly analyze it. For Vancouver, it’s not just that the club got a draft pick and cap space in this deal, it’s that over the course of Beauvillier’s Canucks tenure, holding him removed opportunities that could’ve been used to improve the team more efficiently than whatever upcoming trade the club executes with the cap space the Canucks have now created.

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(Photo: Jeff Vinnick / NHLI via Getty Images)

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