Canucks offseason thoughts: Akil Thomas, extending Zeev Buium and budget constraints

Summer is rushing along, snaking toward the school year and the inevitable return of NHL hockey in late September.

Over the past month, I’ve spent time revisiting some of my favourite places in British Columbia, catching up with family and enjoying a lengthy four-week vacation. That’s given me a lot of time to think about the Vancouver Canucks, about rebuilding in an era of cap growth and about what to expect this season.

We’ll spend the next several weeks getting into all of that (and more) in the lead-up to Canucks training camp, which will open in Penticton on Sept. 17.

To mark my return from vacation, however, I wanted to elaborate on three Canucks items I’ve been dwelling on, catch up on some of the news I missed and unpack some of the under-the-radar moves that are more important than first meets the eye.

1. The sneaky importance of Akil Thomas

Veteran forward Akil Thomas was a bit of an under-the-radar signing on July 1, with the Canucks getting him on a one-year, two-way deal with a $375,000 salary at the AHL level, according to Puckpedia.

Thomas, a former Los Angeles Kings draftee, is very familiar to Abbotsford general manager Richard Seeley from his time managing the Ontario Reign, the Kings’ AHL affiliate. In fact, in an odd quirk, Seeley actually traded Thomas midway through last season, although the motivation behind that deal was largely about doing right by the player.

“He’s a great player, a great kid,” Seeley told The Athletic in early July. “He had the previous year in the NHL, and I’ve watched him as he’s grown up. I’m a big fan of the person and the player. He battled some injuries last season and had some tough breaks, but the previous year he was in the NHL the whole time and then he was back down with us. … In fairness to him, he was looking for an opportunity to get back to the NHL. … So that’s what was behind that transaction.”

Canucks fans should monitor Thomas closely at training camp and in the preseason. The 26-year-old pivot is right-handed, something of a rarity among centres in Vancouver’s lineup, and has the versatility to contribute on the wing. While his AHL production doesn’t hint at a player with sneaky NHL upside in the Phil Di Giuseppe mold, Thomas will probably be a veteran difficult for young Canucks hopefuls like Braeden Cootes or Jonathan Lekkerimäki to beat out for a roster spot.

“He’s a solid player, he’ll provide some NHL depth and I think he can contribute to an NHL level when he’s healthy,” Seeley said. “Little bit of versatility on the wing and at centre, too. I think he’ll be good for our dressing room, as far as the way he works and the person that he is, for our younger guys as well.”

If Thomas can’t crack Vancouver’s lineup to open the year, his importance might be even more magnified in Abbotsford, especially given the projected composition of Abbotsford’s centre group. While Cootes and Ilya Safonov will hope to open the year with Vancouver, if they start the season in the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford will have a very young group of centres, with first-year professional Riley Patterson also warranting mention.

“Yeah, it is a young group, but there’s some versatility there, and that’s where Akil can be handy if he is in Abbotsford,” Seeley said. “To insulate those guys a little bit, and do the heavy lifting if needed. I don’t know that we’ll be adding a centre (over the rest of the summer) — we want to make sure we get the guys we have some reps and opportunities.”

Akil Thomas played 32 games across two seasons with the Los Angeles Kings. (Harry How / Getty Images)

2. Coaching staff and the big summer budget question

There’s no way around this one: In mid-July, the Canucks finished assembling a coaching staff around first-year bench boss Manny Malhotra, and it consists of zero meaningful NHL experience.

Ryan Mougenel is an experienced AHL bench boss who spent the past five years coaching the Providence Bruins. Jordan Smith has been an assistant coach in Abbotsford for the past three seasons but has never coached in the NHL. Jason Krog has never been an assistant coach at the professional level, having spent the past few years as a skills and skating coach in Vancouver.

Malhotra, of course, has been around the NHL his entire adult life. He managed a lengthy career as a journeyman player and served as an assistant coach in Vancouver and Toronto for seven years before taking the head coaching job with Abbotsford in summer 2024. He isn’t going to show up in this job bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and he certainly has more substantive experience than his predecessor Adam Foote.

Still, it’s a truism in league circles that the NHL isn’t a rookie league. Whether you’re a player, a head coach, an assistant coach or support staff, it’s difficult to have a sense of the rhythms, the obligations and the best way to anticipate issues that inevitably crop up when you haven’t been through a full cycle at the NHL level.

To have a coaching staff composed entirely of first-year NHL coaches is a massive risk, even accounting for Vancouver’s ambitions this upcoming season. It’s a red flag, frankly — one that shines a significant spotlight on the team’s extremely budget-conscious manner in this first rebuilding offseason.

That said, the shape of the coaching staff at least seems intentional and sensible. Mougenel may not have NHL head coaching experience, but he’s been on an AHL bench for the past 12 years, including the previous five as a head coach. He might not bring NHL-level familiarity to the role, but he’s got a reasonably senior profile and seems like a very strong candidate (even if you can poke holes in his player development track record in Providence).

Smith has significant familiarity with Malhotra, and that’s vital. Bringing in an assistant coach who has that built-in rapport and can function as the head coach’s “guy” — a sounding board with whom a coach can close the door to the office and have the sort of frank, problem-solving conversations that are so often required in the job — is absolutely necessary. It was a problem for Foote last season, for example, that he didn’t have a “guy” on the coaching staff.

Finally, Krog is very highly regarded around the league as a sharp hockey mind, and has a profile similar to what Yogi Švejkovský brought to the job during the Rick Tocchet era. Švejkovský is now established as an NHL assistant, and Krog is widely viewed as a solid bet to follow a similar path.

This group could succeed as teachers during a rebuilding season, especially if able to tune out the outside noise and focus on internal, incremental improvements.

It seems like a similar story in Abbotsford. Like Patrick Johnston and Rick Dhaliwal this summer, I’d heard from multiple sources that the Canucks had top CHL candidates — including Memorial Cup winner Jussi Ahokas, who landed with the Colorado Eagles — who withdrew from the Abbotsford process because of the unappealing compensation package on offer for the Abbotsford job.

The Canucks still managed to land a really interesting, up-and-coming coach in Ryan Papaioannou, the longtime head honcho for the Brooks Bandits of the Alberta Junior Hockey League. Papaioannou is very highly thought of in league circles, has a reputation for being an innovative, outside-the-box thinker and a master recruiter, and absolutely smashed his first professional opportunity with the Wheeling Nailers of the ECHL last season. The Nailers accumulated 46 wins in 72 games and advanced to the third round of the Kelly Cup playoffs, before falling to the dynastic Florida Everblades (who went on to win the Kelly Cup for the fourth time in the past five seasons).

From the outside looking in, it feels like this new management team is making high-quality staffing choices on a shoestring budget. With that in mind, one wonders whether the high-quality leaders the organization is assembling — including Henrik and Daniel Sedin, and Ryan Johnson — are being put in the best possible position to succeed.

3. The Koivunen contract should motivate the Canucks to be more aggressive

The current NHL collective bargaining agreement will expire on Sept. 15, in just four weeks.

Once that happens, NHL teams will be unable to sign players to maximum eight-year contracts; the new maximum term will be just seven years. Just as importantly, the rules governing signing bonus amounts and year-over-year variability will be permanently tightened, significantly limiting the Canucks’ ability to structure contracts in a way that enhances their trade value in the future.

This is a dynamic that we’ve unpacked at length regarding Zeev Buium and Liam Öhgren. For a team in Vancouver’s position, this is also an opportunity they can’t afford to miss.

A few weeks ago, the Pittsburgh Penguins made a bet of this variety when they signed 23-year-old forward Ville Koivunen to an eight-year extension with a $4 million annual average value. It was a deal that raised eyebrows around the league — understandably, given Koivunen has scored just two goals in 47 NHL games to this point in his career.

In this moment of continuous cap growth, in which the market forces governing NHL player compensation can be reasonably expected to reset on an annual basis (or whenever a Leo Carlsson type signs an offer sheet), betting big and early is an essential way for teams to capture the types of efficiencies that were routine and a matter of pure discipline during the flat-cap era. The Penguins, amid executing a genuinely impressive on-the-fly rebuilding effort, saw the value in placing precisely that type of bet on Koivunen, and it’ll be fascinating to see if other teams follow suit before the Sept. 15 deadline.

The Canucks, however, should be far more structurally aggressive in pursuing long-term deals for Buium and Öhgren over the next four weeks. In particular, the Penguins effectively used the soon-to-expire contract variability rules to limit the downside risk of extending Koivunen. Essentially, Pittsburgh backloaded the Koivunen deal and stripped it of signing bonuses beyond the first two years. Structurally, they prioritized building an escape hatch into their long-term bet. If Koivunen doesn’t hit, his deal will be very easy to buy out in 2029.

Vancouver, however, should do the opposite in considering how to optimize the exchange value of Buium and Öhgren. The Canucks should be trying to front-load those extensions and load them up with signing bonuses in order to create a moment down the line in which Buium and Öhgren are in their primes and signed to dated, high-value contracts that are heavily cap-over-cash for the teams potentially acquiring them.

If the big-picture question facing the Canucks is how to out-accumulate 31 other teams over a reasonable three-to-four-year timeline, then taking on this sort of risk and placing this type of bet on talented young players of Buium and Öhgren’s ilk should be viewed as effectively necessary.

However, it will require the Canucks to spend in a manner the franchise hasn’t seemed comfortable doing this summer.