I'd be shocked if Rutherford trades Boeser. Canucks are in a groove right now.
Remember the key ingredient (besides Travis Green) to our downfall? The off-season of 2020, trading away well liked pieces in the room.
The Canucks made bad bets in 2020.
Tanev, he was coming off his first full healthy season in over 4 or 5 years. Always missing 20 odd games a year, which is why in 2019, they signed Myers.
Markstrom, due to the ED and Demko's bubble performance, was expendable. But, he got hurt before the TDL. Toffoli they got him at the tdl.
The bad bets that off-season were:
Not fully believing in Demko, thus adding $4.9 mill cap hit on Holtby vs getting a veteran former #1 like a retained Dubnyk that SJ got, or signing someone in the $2.5 mill range.
They also bet on Virtanen to take a step forward, but he went the other way. Funny, of their 2 2014 draft picks, they basically, trusted the wrong one. But, clearly, you could see Demko putting in the work and Jake being Jake. That's $2.55 mill in cap space.
And the Schmidt transaction didn't work out. Green couldn't get the best out of him in his sytem.
The guy to keep was Tanev. Even replacing Jake's roster spot with a $1 mill player, that still would leave around $4 mill left.
A big failure of Benning was not being able to send the final year of Sven Baertschi to LA instead of an expiring Schaller contract in the TT deal. That cost them $2.2 mill in dead cap after burying him in the A. Even retaining 1/3 to 1/2 still saves them $600K to $1.2 mill vs the cap over burying him in the A. That would have been enough to secure Tanev back.
And in this off-season, would mean that they don't sign Hamonic and/or Poolman. Go with a RHD of Tanev, Myers, and run with Burroughs/Schenn on the 3rd pair at 12-13 minutes a game.