With the Canucks’ opening-night roster coming into focus, Ryan Johnson still has one big advantage sitting in his pocket: the top waiver priority. And with preseason games Thursday and Saturday before the regular season opens Tuesday in Edmonton, the clock is moving fast.
NHL teams have to have their rosters set by Monday afternoon, and this year’s decisions are more straightforward than in past seasons. There’s no need to build around injured-reserve math, and the usual wrinkle of squeezing value out of waiver-eligible fringe players isn’t driving the process.
The Canucks’ roster is also projected to be one of the lowest-paid in the league, though still nowhere near the salary floor unless a blockbuster trade changes that picture. Of the players still on the bubble, only one is described as a real concern for waiver exposure.
So the job in front of Johnson is the classic kind: decide how many goalies, defencemen and forwards to carry, then figure out whether the waiver wire offers something better.
In goal, the question starts with roster size. Will Johnson keep two or three?
He’s already sounded like a man leaning toward two. At the end of August, he told nhl.com, “Is it something I’m pining to do?
I don’t like it for the goalies, and I think it’s challenging on the coaches,” when asked about carrying three to begin the season.
That makes the most likely setup pretty clear. Thatcher Demko is expected to start the season on injured reserve.
He has been skating, but hasn’t been seen with the main group. That leaves Kevin Lankinen as the sure thing, with Nikita Tolopilo and Chris Driedger still in camp.
Tolopilo played a lot for the Canucks last season, but struggled, and the team may prefer to get him more time in the AHL - even though waivers would be required. Driedger is in camp on a tryout and was brought in for veteran presence during the preseason.
There will also be goalies available on waivers this weekend, which adds another layer to the decision. The Canucks have to weigh whether one of those options might be more appealing.
The blue line brings its own set of questions. Eight defencemen were still in camp as of Thursday afternoon, including Guillaume Brisebois and Vincent Mancini.
Brisebois has become one of those steady organizational success stories: enough teams have liked him to keep him under NHL contract, but injuries have limited him to 336 professional games since he turned pro with Utica in 2017. He would need waivers to go down, though it’s hard to picture another NHL club claiming him now.
If he sticks, he looks like the kind of depth piece who can handle nights in the press box without complaint.
Mancini is a different case. He’s a skillful prospect, but he hasn’t made much of an impression in the first two preseason games.
He does not need waivers to be assigned to Abbotsford, but he is on a one-way deal, so he would still collect his NHL salary in the minors. He’s set to make $950,000 this season, with a cap hit of $1 million.
Right now, he hasn’t shown enough to jump veterans like Luke Schenn, which leaves the Canucks with a choice: keep him around as a healthy scratch, or send him to the AHL where he can actually play major minutes.
Up front, Braeden Cootes has had a strong preseason, but the expectation is that he’ll head to the AHL and take over as the top centre there. He should be an NHL regular soon enough.
Once that happens, the remaining forward spots depend on how the rest of the roster is shaped. If the Canucks carry only two goalies, that would point toward either two extra defencemen or two extra forwards. If they go with two extra forwards, the picture becomes pretty simple: Arshdeep Bains, Max Sasson and Aatu Raty all make the team, and one of them dresses on any given night.
If there’s only room for one extra forward, then one of those three would have to be waived, unless the club chooses another route and sends Jonathan Lekkerimäki to Abbotsford. He doesn’t need waivers, but Johnson has made it clear he’d prefer to keep the Swedish sniper in the NHL and let him figure things out there.
That leaves the waiver wire itself as the final piece. Johnson has the top priority, and the sense is that he’ll use it.
Ottawa’s Leevi Meriläinen is one example that could be interesting; the young goalie had a rough season last year, but he fits the kind of profile Canucks goalie scout Ian Clark might like. A forward or defenceman could also catch their eye.
For a rebuilding team, the message is simple: keep checking every corner.
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Vancouver has already seen three other players it waived this week, Trey Fix-Wolansky, Cole Clayton and Jimmy Schuldt, clear and head to AHL Abbotsford. For Stienburg, the timing adds another layer of difficulty to a push that has already been complicated by injuries over the past two seasons, leaving him in a spot where every shift matters and every roster decision around him carries extra weight. [Read more 🡒]