Filip Hronek’s eight-year, $58 million deal to remain with the Vancouver Canucks through 2032 is a fair deal.
Now a fair deal isn’t necessarily a team-friendly deal. Hronek’s price tag, in terms of the annual average value of the contract, isn’t the price an NHL team pays to a top-pair defender. It’s the price paid for a 1A defender.
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Canucks re-sign Filip Hronek to 8-year, $58 million extension
This is a significant valuation for a gifted, reliable 26-year-old defender coming off of a career year. The other NHL defenders paid similarly to Hronek — Vince Dunn, Noah Hanifin, Devon Toews — might be left-handed, but they also have longer track records playing at the top of the lineup and driving their own pairs — both in terms of play and in terms of offence.
Hronek’s ultimate price tag reflects, more than anything, the player’s desire to stay in Vancouver long-term in conjunction with his unique leverage given his gaudy production, significant impact and the workhorse-level ice time he logged in an arbitration-eligible campaign.
General Manager Patrik Allvin announces that the #Canucks have agreed to terms with defenceman Filip Hronek on an 8-year contract with a $7.25M AAV. pic.twitter.com/gmRO7O6AOm
— Vancouver Canucks (@Canucks) June 18, 2024
It’s a deal that carries the usual risks associated with any eight-year contract, even for a relatively young defender who will turn 27 next season. The deal reflects the Canucks’ steadfast belief in Hronek, both as a fit on Quinn Hughes’ right side, and as a player the organization would like to challenge to do more offensively driving his own pair, in a future where their blue-line options are more robust than they are currently.
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This insistence that the Hronek deal is a fair deal, a reflection of a retail price paid for a player who fit in perfectly in his first Canucks season, isn’t a negative one. It’s a telling one.
Vancouver overpaid to acquire Hronek in a counterintuitive trade that didn’t seem to match how the club was positioned. They believed in his talent, and in the rarity of the opportunity to land a dynamic right-handed defender in his prime. It worked, and Vancouver wouldn’t have had nearly the same level of success this past season if they hadn’t made that controversial deal.
On Tuesday, they paid retail price once again to support that bet and to get Hronek signed long-term, which was always the organization’s preference, as The Athletic has repeatedly reported. They did so for a similar reason.
The truth is that under president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford and general manager Patrik Allvin, this Canucks hockey operations group isn’t cowed by popular notions of sticker shock.
They’re hunting for players who can help the Canucks win, and for the right player, with the right skill set, at the right stage of their career, they will pay a significant price — they will even overpay — to acquire and retain that player.
If you want to understand Vancouver’s offseason to this point and if you want to understand what’s coming down the pike with various unrestricted free agents still bound for the open market on July 1, the NHL draft looming next week and the free agent frenzy set to kick off the week after, it’s worth keeping this house rule in mind.
The Canucks are willing to overpay, and they will swing aggressively to land the pieces they think can put this team over the top.
This logic is the key to understanding what’s unfolded so far for the Canucks this offseason. For example, to this point, the Canucks haven’t had any luck signing their pending unrestricted free agents.
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It isn’t for a lack of effort. Getting a long-term deal done with Hronek was the club’s first priority, but they’ve put in the leg work with their other key pending unrestricted free-agent players.
Now these things can change in an instant, but there’s an internal understanding that reliable veteran centre Elias Lindholm is more likely to depart on July 1 than he is to remain in Vancouver. The team would love to keep big-bodied glue guys like Nikita Zadorov and Dakota Joshua in the fold if they can, but internally, the Canucks have begun to accept that that’s going to be difficult.
“It definitely appears to us here that we’re not going to be able to sign all of them,” was how Allvin summarized the club’s posture on Tuesday afternoon.
With some dawning sense of internal pessimism governing the Canucks’ planning as it regards their biggest name unrestricted free agents, Tyler Myers and Teddy Blueger are perhaps the most interesting names to watch among Vancouver’s expiring players ahead of July 1.
The team will prioritize retaining Blueger with more urgency in the event that Lindholm walks. There is clearly mutual interest in keeping Myers in British Columbia, but the veteran, 6-foot-7, right-handed defender will himself be in demand on the open market if a deal doesn’t occur before July 1.
And in the background, even after committing $7.25 million to Hronek on Tuesday, the Canucks are sitting on a veritable $20 million war chest of functional salary cap space. For the first time since the Rutherford and Allvin regime took over leadership of Canucks hockey operations, the team is poised to go into the meat of the NHL silly season with real purchasing power — and every intention to use it.
This is the real takeaway from the Hronek extension. It’s a reinforcement of the specific brand of aggression that has become typical, even characteristic, for this Canucks front office.
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This is a team with meaningful cap flexibility and a core group that’s already locked up for next season, with multiple years of runway before Thatcher Demko and Quinn Hughes’ deals expire.
This is a team that thinks their core group is close to contending credibly for the Stanley Cup, but that still believes they need to upgrade their defence corps while — perhaps more importantly — adding an established, star-level scoring winger into the mix.
On Tuesday, Hronek was extended at a fair market rate on a long-term deal. He’s a top-of-the-lineup contributor and shoring that up was essential.
Now the top priority shifts. The biggest slice of Vancouver’s cap pie has been doled out. And what comes next, accordingly, isn’t necessarily about keeping this team’s expiring players, although the club would still love to do so at an affordable clip and will keep trying.
Now, the top priority is to find that difference-making player — another Hronek — to further elevate this team. To push it over the top.
Ideally that player is a top-line winger, and the team is excited internally about some of the forward possibilities that are currently bound for the open market on July 1. Make no mistake though, further blue-line upgrades are viewed as essential too.
The Canucks have positioned themselves carefully to take a big swing in free agency or on the trade market this summer. As both the Hronek trade and extension serve to remind us, if the right player is available, this organization is going to worry about landing him. They’re not going to worry about the price.
(Photo of Filip Hronek: Jamie Douglas / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
