July 1st, 2025
JC Clemas
The Brockstar.
Prince Charming.
Flow God.
He’s back.
After almost 3 full months of the Canucks and Boeser just not quite being close enough to work out a deal, they managed to get it done 27 minutes into free agency.
I don’t know why they had to play with our hearts like that, but I don’t even care. Brock Boeser is a Vancouver Canuck forever.
Or, more particularly, for at least 7 more years.
The exact terms of the contract are 7 years for $7.25 million per year. It’s interestingly the exact same AAV as Filip Hronek, just for 1 less year.
The free agency pool was unbelievably dry this year. Most players had simply re-signed with their teams in the past week, with a lot of those coming yesterday. The biggest fish went off the market on Free Agency Eve, as Mitch Marner was the subject of a sign-and-trade to Vegas.
But we’ll focus on the positives.
Undoubtedly, a lot of teams would have checked in on Boeser, and a lot of those had serious interest for a while. More recently, Edmonton emerged as a potential destination for Boeser. Imagine that? I don’t think I’d ever be able to enjoy hockey again.
Luckily for us, Boeser was always committed to Vancouver. He wanted to be here. It’s Vancouver that wasn’t always committed to him. It’s a good thing they changed their minds. There are only really 2 top-6 players on the free agency market in Nikolaj Ehlers and Mikael Granlund, who each have way too many suitors for the Canucks to ever be able to draw one of them to Vancouver. Lo and behold, the big top-6 addition for the Canucks was right under their nose the whole time.
The contract itself appears to be pretty much market value for Boeser. He’s a guy who’s 1 season removed from a 40 goal season, and all things considered, the Canucks are financially lucky he didn’t repeat that this past year. Boeser struggled this past season, like so many Canucks forwards did. With the locker room issues in the rearview mirror, and with the team able to just focus on hockey, it wouldn’t be a surprise if Boeser can return to form. While he may not be able to hit 40 goals without J.T. Miller centring him, it’s still highly likely that he returns to grabbing the team lead in goals next season.
The contract will expire when Boeser is 35, which will be his 17th year with the organization. He currently sits at 22nd place on the franchise’s all-time games played list with 554, and if he stays healthy, he could easily become the 4th player in franchise history to ever play 1000 games with the organization (Sedins, Linden). Boeser is also 8th all-time in goals with the Canucks (204) and 12th all-time in points (434).
This is a huge signing for not only the on-ice parts of the game, but also for team morale. Boeser seems to be best friends with everyone in that locker room. He’s an all-around great guy and losing him would have left an irreplaceable hole in this team’s culture.
Considering the locker room issues this team faced last season, it really says a lot that Boeser, Garland, Demko, and Forbort were all happy to re-sign with the team. If the locker room issues were still hovering around the atmosphere in Vancouver, there’s no chance that they would be willing to stay in Vancouver for longer than their contracts had them there. They all chose to stay, though. This team clearly likes each other now, and while some question marks still exist in the team chemistry, it seems like that shouldn’t affect the results anymore. We’re past that.
After the Boeser signing, the Canucks are left with $556k in cap space. That is still enough money to sign… uhhhhh… well, absolutely no one. But it seems that they are comfortable with their roster now. The only real change from last season’s roster is that Suter will be out now, replaced by Evander Kane. Kind of a tough trade-off. The good news is that the team showed more heart toward the end of the season. The results were not always there, but next year we’ll get to see our very skilled defense with an actually healthy Quinn Hughes leading. With health and bounce-back years from a couple of the forwards, this team could absolutely be a playoff team again.
There is a very clear issue with our centre depth. Filip Chytil is the 2nd line centre and Blueger is the 3rd line centre. Quite a steep fall-off from having J.T. Miller as the 2nd line centre and Pius Suter as the 3rd line centre. But hey, the Hurricanes were a really good team this past season, and their 2nd line centre was often Jesperi Kotkaniemi. So we could be okay. We still have some players with value who don’t really fit into our current lineup, but the real difficulty would be clearing the cap space to bring in someone of value. If it didn’t already look bad, Artūrs Šilovs has made it look TERRIBLE that the Canucks are paying a backup goalie $4.5 million a year. That money could have gone to a centre, and our Latvian legend could have assumed the role behind Demko. What’s done is done.
It’s truly magical that Brock Boeser is staying with the Canucks. Seeing him in any other jersey would just feel wrong. He’s given his heart and soul to this organization, and I’m thrilled that the team finally decided to offer him the terms he was looking for. After some questionable moves by the front office recently, a surefire way to get back in the good graces of the Canucks faithful is by re-signing the fan favourite. You have to hand it to Allvin, Rutherford, and the rest. That’s great damage control.
So basically, all that worrying about Boeser leaving was for absolutely nothing.
But the important thing is that he’s back.