A talented two-way player, Sutter is an effective penalty killer with an occasional scoring touch. They don’t have a lot of wiggle room to work with if they start to get hit by serious injuries again, but there are options there for finding temporary cap relief. In the Canucks’ eyes though, he’s a better fit. “We have enough good players now”.
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He also said he’s moving towards trying to get the 2016 unrestricted free agent locked up to a contract. Despite his reputation for a good point shot, he managed just one power-play assist (and only two assists in total) during his time as a Canuck.
“To me, he’s a foundation piece for this group going forward”. “He can still bring offense to our team”.
The Canucks also cleared up a few space in three places that Kassian, Lack, and Bieksa were clogging – not-panned-out wingers who are stuck between the top six and the bottom six, goalies battling to be Ryan Miller’s backup, and veteran blueliners who are best to contend somewhere else while they still can.
So the Canucks bought high on Bonino and sold low on him a year later. He was, in no uncertain terms, a liability in Vancouver’s first-round playoff series loss to the Flames.
The Rangers took care of Round One business in just five games against the Pens in the Playoffs. “He’s a playoff player. When the games mean something that is when he is at his best”.
Though Benning praised Bonino’s contributions at length during Tuesday’s conference call, it’s hard not to hear an indirect criticism of Bonino’s edge-less performance in the post-season.
Instead, Kesler was eventually moved last summer to Anaheim in exchange for Bonino.
Brandon Sutter was traded to the Vancouver Canucks. The 2015-16 National Hockey League salary cap is only $71.4 million, so they would already be over the cap before even filling in the final slots.
Quite honestly, this trade made no sense at all for the Vancouver Canucks.
Most fans have been focusing on the expected returns they’ll get from the two centres in the deal.
Numbers were there, for the most part, for the former Carolina Hurricanes first round draft pick, but at a closer look, maybe they aren’t as great.
“We don’t want to put any added pressure on [Horvat] to be somewhere in the lineup that he couldn’t handle”, Benning said. His comments paint the Canucks as the reactive party, both in the initiation of trade talks right through to the haggling over specifics.
“It’s certainly the area that we will watch the closest”, Rutherford said. Benning also sees Sutter as a leader of the younger Canucks along with Bo Horvat.
A deal sending Pittsburgh Penguins forward Brandon Sutter out of the Metropolitan Division club’s roster has been seemingly imminent for weeks.
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The Penguins also signed UFA centre Eric Fehr, 29, to a three-year, $6-million contract to further restructure their third and fourth lines.
