The extension Bo Horvat just signed with the New York Islanders would have been deadly for the Vancouver Canucks

The extension Bo Horvat just signed with the New York Islanders would have been deadly for the Vancouver Canucks

Eight years, an AAV of $8.5 million and total compensation of $68 million.

That’s what it cost the New York Islanders to keep Bo Horvat long-term after the blockbuster trade in which they took on the former Vancouver Canucks captain.

It’s not hometown discount, nor is it a particularly enviable contract.

That’s not to say Horvat isn’t already greatly missed in Vancouver, or that he won’t be for years to come. But you’ll hardly find anyone on the market who doesn’t check out this expansion and breathe a sigh of relief that it won’t be signed with the Canucks.

Now, we have to preface this conversation with the fact that at several points in the past, it would have been entirely possible for the Canucks to sign Horvat for well under $68 million.

The Canucks could have opted to sign Horvat for an extension last summer when the price was reportedly far lower for him and his camp. But we don’t live in this timeline. For some reason, the team turned down Horvat’s demands, instead allowing him to bet on his own performance as UFA, then reverted to signing JT Miller for his own massive expansion.

This is the reality we found ourselves in. And in this timeline, the extension Horvat just signed with the Islanders must be accepted as one that would have been fatal to the Canucks had they signed themselves.

The first and most obvious reason is that the Horvat contract is just plain bad, or at least one that’s almost guaranteed to age badly. Horvat will start the 2023/24 season at the age of 28 and join Leon Draisaitl and Steven Stamkos in earning the 40th highest cap in the entire NHL. Apparently he’s being paid with this current season’s production in mind.

But this season is very, very likely Horvat’s absolute peak performance and a statistical outlier at that. Horvat has never scored 31 goals or 61 points in a season and is currently on his way to 51 goals and 90 points.

All the hallmarks of a particularly lucky season are there: an increase in power play production, a shot rate more than 7% above his career average, a hot start that has slowly but surely cooled. All in one contract year, and all while Horvat exits the typical NHL forward prime.

That’s not to say Horvat isn’t having a superb season or that he doesn’t deserve the honor of being one of the league’s top scorers, even if only briefly.

It’s just to highlight the harsh reality that the 2022/23 season will almost certainly be the best of Horvat’s career and that the contract he just signed that compensates him based on that season won’t be available until 2023/24 in will come into force. and cycle through each season from then until 2031, when he turns 36.

The Islanders see diminishing returns almost immediately from Horvat and a player practically destined to fall below his contract somewhere around the half-way mark, if not sooner. Even the rising salary cap isn’t stopping the islanders from becoming albatrosses at some point.

There’s just no way the cap will increase over the next eight years to the point where $8.5 million isn’t considered roughly “first-line compensation.” Sooner or later Horvat will stop producing like a first-line center and at that point he will be overpaid despite his many intangibles. That’s the way it is.

So what would such a millstone have done to the Vancouver Canucks?

Well, given that the Canucks only have a few million cap spots available for the 2023 offseason, even without Horvat, the impact would have been felt quickly. The $5.5 million extension for Andrei Kuzmenko would have become an impossibility and likely never happened given that the 26-year-old sensation was either traded or ran as a UFA in its first year.

Rather than opening up flexibility in the summer, the Canucks would have been paralyzed again by tight cap restrictions, allowing them to be exploited by the rest of the league.

Even if they somehow managed to lengthen Horvat and keep everyone else on the team, any money that could theoretically have been set aside to actually improve the roster would have already been spent.

Adding Horvat to that roster for $8.5 million would have ensured that roster would have stayed more or less the same — and therefore deeply inadequate — for the foreseeable future. “Stuck in neutral” would be putting it mildly. Imagine, if you will, a theoretical 2027 with Horvat, Miller, and Oliver Ekman-Larsson, all in their 30s or later, and on the books for a combined cap of $22.76 million. This is far worse than “neutral”.

And those are just the immediate consequences. Within two years you would see that a 30-year-old Horvat and his massive salary could stand in the way of renewal for Elias Pettersson, not to mention lesser reps for young talents like Vasily Podkolzin and Nils Höglander.

In short, this Horvat extension would hurt the Canucks now and continue to hurt their entire length.

Well, what if, like Barry Allen himself, we could go back in time and change a few things. Is there a reality where this Horvat expansion could have worked for the Canucks?

Well, first of all, one would have to go back far enough to ensure that the Miller extension is never signed.

Without Miller and his seven years at $8 million on the books, Horvat at $8.5 million becomes significantly more palatable, although it’s far from ideal for all of the reasons listed above. In that scenario, the Canucks could likely sign Horvat And Kuzmenko just as they have now signed Miller and Kuzmenko but they would still be in the same boat when it comes to roster improvement.

Perhaps the hardest reality condition to swallow is that with an aging Miller in the books by 2030, the Canucks are in dire financial straits, not to mention Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Brock Boeser and Conor Garland, among others .

Swap Miller at 7 x $8m for a slightly younger Horvat at 8 x $8.5m and the team might be in slightly better shape going forward, but not by much. Certainly not enough to call a Horvat expansion a “good” idea at its current market value.

No, if we jump back in time to fix this issue, we’d have to go all the way back to when negotiations first started this summer.

Had the Canucks met Horvat and his camp at their asking price from the start, they could potentially have signed him for something averaging as low as $7 million, or maybe even as late as $6 million.

Extend Horvat at this rate, trade Miller instead of signing him, and suddenly the Canucks are on a much better path to moving forward. Again, even Horvat isn’t anywhere near ideal at this late 30 pace and might go further both Miller and Horvat would have been the wisest course of all. But at least this option would have been the better one.

But that option went out the window when the Canucks turned down Horvat’s request and returned to extend Miller instead. And there was a second, even bigger window of around ten games into the 2022/23 season, with Horvat planning to back himself and reacting with the stoker of stokers. Horvat scored his tenth goal of the season in his 11th game.

By this time the writing was on the wall and Horvat was PAID by someone.

The Canucks can regret the past decisions that got them to this point as much as they want.

But they still shouldn’t regret not signing that particular contract.

Such regrets will be the job of Lou Lamoriello and the New York Islanders from now on.

Source: canucksarmy.com