It took a week for the move to really land.
Jamie Oleksiak, the former Kraken defenseman now headed to Vancouver, signed with the Canucks on July 1 as a free agent and landed a deal worth $5-million per season for two years. There’s a small wrinkle in the money over the 24-month stretch, with a signing bonus built into year two and a modified 12-team no-trade clause, but the bottom line is simple: it’s a $400,000 bump from what he was making in Seattle.
The contract says plenty about where Vancouver is right now. The Canucks are still piecing together their blue line in the middle of a rebuild, and the league’s rising cap - now up to $103-million per team - is part of the backdrop for the move. They also brought back 36-year-old Luke Schenn for a third run with the club.
Schenn, based on his recent workload, looks like he’s nearing the end of the road. Still, he and Oleksiak should give some muscle and protection around young defenseman Zeev Buium, the player acquired from the Minnesota Wild in the Quinn Hughes deal and viewed at this point as “Hughes-lite”. We’ll see.
There’s also a leadership angle to the Canucks’ latest additions. Schenn and 34-year-old forward Brendan Gallagher, who will always be a Montreal Canadien despite growing up in Burnaby and playing junior with the Vancouver Giants, are expected to help show the younger players what the standard looks like.
As for Oleksiak, he moves from one stalled situation to another. However long it takes Seattle or Vancouver to get where they want to go, he wasn’t going to be around long enough to chase a Stanley Cup in either place.
His best shot at that would have come as a UFA depth piece for a contender at the trade deadline, if the Kraken had moved him for a pick or two. They didn’t.
Seattle’s season, and Oleksiak’s play, fell off after the trade deadline. Before that, he’d been uneven over the previous two seasons, and the numbers weren’t the kind that would make analytics people start celebrating.
What he has always been, though, is available. At 6-foot-7 and 250 pounds, he’s been remarkably durable, missing just 11 games over the last four years. He played every game in both the 2023-’24 and 2024-’25 Kraken seasons.
Now the “Big Rig” gets a chance to position himself for another trade deadline or two. Time is running short if he’s still chasing that first Stanley Cup.
His closest brush came in 2020 with the Dallas Stars, the team that drafted him in the first round of the NHL Draft 15 years ago. Dallas lost the Final in six games to the Tampa Bay Lightning.
With his exit, Oleksiak becomes one of the last “original Kraken” still standing. Five remain.
In Other News...
One Oilers Roster Decision Is Still Hanging Over The Summer
The summer trade market has already started to stir around the Kraken, even if Seattle has not shown any interest in moving Shane Wright cheaply. Vancouver has checked in on the young center, and the conversation has quickly run into the familiar hurdle that comes with a player the Kraken still view as part of their long-term core. With Wright under team control for years to come, Seattle has every reason to treat any serious inquiry as a premium proposition rather than a simple roster shuffle.
What makes the situation worth watching is that the Canucks are not alone in trying to sort out their own priorities, and that keeps the pressure on Seattle to hold firm. Vancouver has made clear it wants strong value in any major deal, not a salary dump, while Edmonton is still working through its own restricted free agent business and focusing on outside additions. For the Kraken, the result is a market where interest is real, but so far nobody appears eager to pay the price Seattle is asking. [Read more 🡒]