Sometimes in hockey and in life, you end up right where you started.
When the Vancouver Canucks’ improbable, remarkable 2023-24 campaign concluded in May, the health status of star netminder Thatcher Demko — who seemed to be ramping up his on-ice work significantly, and looked to be on the verge of returning to action — was the biggest lingering question surrounding the hockey club.
We’re now late into August, just about four weeks out from the opening of training camp, and Demko’s availability is once again the front and centre topic in this crazy hockey town.
This week, Rick Dhaliwal reported on Sportsnet 650 that the Canucks were still poking around on the goalie market, an effort that’s ongoing as we head into the weekend.
The club is exploring its options and appears to be in the market for additional insurance in net. That’s understandable, given that Demko remains without a timeline as he progresses through his rehab, and is coming off of back-to-back knee injuries.
Multiple league sources have since indicated to The Athletic that Demko won’t be ready for training camp and preseason games. The club is hopeful that its Vezina Trophy finalist will be available to play on opening night — Oct. 9 against the Calgary Flames — but even that seems to be in question at this late stage of the summer.
There’s a bit of a cone of silence around exactly what’s occurring here. To this point, no one close to the situation will confirm whether or not Demko underwent a surgical procedure this summer.
We do know that Demko pushed extraordinarily hard to get back in time for the playoffs, only to sustain an injury late in Game 1 of Vancouver’s first-round series against the Nashville Predators. It was a devastating setback for the supremely talented, extraordinarily competitive goaltender, but Demko continued to travel with the team and support his teammates, and resumed working to try and get back into the lineup as Vancouver’s playoff run continued.
Ahead of Game 6 of Vancouver’s second-round series in Edmonton, Demko’s work — including post integrations, and push-offs — appeared to be advancing enough that his return to action seemed close, if not imminent. Ultimately, however, the Canucks were eliminated in Game 7 of that series, and Demko ran out of runway to make it back into the blue paint.
By the time of the NHL Draft in Las Vegas, the tenor of Vancouver’s goaltending plans seemed to shift behind the scenes. We began to hear that Demko hadn’t skated since the day of Game 7 against the Oilers. The uncertainty was sufficient that Vancouver restarted dormant contract talks with veteran backup Casey DeSmith and signed young, experienced netminder Jiří Patera in unrestricted free agency.
While Demko arrived in Vancouver about a week ago with the other Canucks goaltenders, there seems to have been another more recent shift in Vancouver’s plans in the crease.
This week, the club reached out to unrestricted free agent goaltender Kevin Lankinen, a veteran Finnish-born netminder who played solid hockey in a backup for the Predators last season.
The club clearly has strong interest in the 29-year-old Lankinen, who has appeared in more than 100 NHL games and has reliably managed a roughly average save percentage at the NHL level. There’s also some built in familiarity between Lankinen, a Helsinki native, and new Canucks goaltending coach Marko Torenius.
While Lankinen has emerged as Vancouver’s top insurance target, and we believe the club made him an offer this week, this isn’t necessarily going to be an easy agreement to strike. Lankinen remains without a contract in late August, but he earned $2 million last season and has the sort of experience and profile that would tend to earn an NHL goaltender a contract worth more than a veteran minimum one-year contract.
This is where the club’s options get interesting, in part because of how this specific need — some short-term veteran insurance in net — interacts with the club’s lofty ambitions heading into this season.
From a salary-cap standpoint, Vancouver could free up the additional cap space to afford Lankinen if they were willing to place Tucker Poolman’s $2.5 million contract on long-term injured reserve for the full season, but as it stands, the club plans to enter the season outside of LTI. For Canucks management, Plan A remains to accrue salary-cap space throughout this upcoming campaign, for the purpose of maximizing cap flexibility at the 2025 trade deadline.
However this shakes out — and the club will surely have other, potentially more affordable options to dig through on the waiver wire over the next six weeks — the club’s pursuit of Lankinen hints at some continued uncertainty in the Canucks’ crease in the final stages of the offseason.
It also suggests that the club would prefer to have another experienced option beyond Patera, Artūrs Šilovs and Nikita Tolopilo in hand, should Demko not be cleared in time for Game 1 of the regular season.
The Ian Clark thing
This week, it was announced that Ian Clark will no longer serve as the Canucks’ goaltending coach. He’s also no longer the club’s director of goaltending. Clark will, however, remain with the club in a scouting role and as a goalie development coach.
There’s no sugarcoating the fact that Clark is one of the NHL’s most highly regarded and effective goalie coaches. Losing his services in that capacity is a significant blow for the organization.
Clark has a strong relationship, and has built up a good deal of mutual trust, with Demko. Demko actively (and publicly) lobbied the organization to retain Clark a few years ago, when Clark worked through a lame-duck season during the end of the pandemic. There’s no word on how Demko’s camp feels about this week’s changes, but it’s clear that they had a heads-up and weren’t caught off-guard by the news.
This decision was made by Clark. There are physical demands to being an everyday goalie coach, and transitioning out of a hands-on, on-ice role was a matter of time for the 58-year-old Vancouver-born coach.
What’s more difficult to work through is why Clark lost his title as director of goaltending in the transition.
At the very least, it’s a change that opens the door to another team offering Clark a director-level role. Given that such an offer would now be a promotion, it would be difficult for the Canucks to withhold their permission for Clark to take on a new role within another NHL hockey operations department.
The timing, also, is suboptimal. Not only is it late in the summer, but the club has a star netminder working his way back from back-to-back knee injuries, and is still in the market for additional insurance in net.
Tidbits
No update on Brock Boeser: Coming off of a 40-goal campaign, Canucks winger Brock Boeser became extension-eligible on July 1. We checked in on it this week, and we heard that there have been no talks between the two sides this summer.
Dakota Joshua arrives early: With his big, new contract in hand, Canucks winger Dakota Joshua has arrived in Vancouver very early and is already skating at Scotia Barn (the old Eight Rinks) with several local NHL players. Joshua had a rough ride and was called to the carpet for his fitness level during training camp last fall, and this is a strong indication that the bruising Canucks forward is intent on making sure that there’s no repeat of that this year.
Vasili Podkolzin trade notes: The decision to move Vasili Podkolzin wasn’t straightforward, but given that the club invested heavily in wing depth this summer, club leadership felt that it would be tough for Podkolzin to make the team out of training camp. While Podkolzin struggled to produce last season, he still has a unique profile given his size, motor and skill level. He’s also now eligible for waivers, and the club knew that he wouldn’t clear if he didn’t land a job among Vancouver’s top 13 forwards at camp. The decision was made to move him now for a fourth-round pick, as opposed to risking losing him on waivers or accepting the sort of low-ball offer from a club intent on jumping the waiver queue closer to Canadian Thanksgiving.
The return: No longtime observer of this hockey club will be shocked to hear that the fourth-round pick — originally belonging to the Ottawa Senators— that the Canucks got back in the Podkolzin trade is already burning a hole in the pocket of Canucks hockey operations leadership. It’s ammunition, an asset that’s already been pretty explicitly marked as something that the club will look to use to improve during this season.
PTOs: The Canucks brought in Sammy Blais on an American Hockey League contract that includes an invite to training camp. With Podkolzin moving on, the club wanted to bring in some additional forward size to enhance its overall options. Cloverdale native Jujhar Khaira was also on the club’s radar for such a role. A couple of names still out there that the Canucks have not shown interest in: Nick Cousins and Milan Lucic.
(Photo of Thatcher Demko: Harry How / Getty Images)
