Few have mentioned the possibility of trading Pearson so I thought we can discuss it here. Pearson has been a great fit alongside Horvat and is friends with Tofolli (if we were to re-sign him). The team is better with him than without him. However, I thought he was largely ineffective in his last few games against Vegas. He's a solid complimentary player who is going into the last year of his contract at $3.75M AAV. He just turned 28. He really has been a great acquisition for the Canucks. But is he a player you want to extend? Unless it's a short-term 2 year type extension, most of us here would probably prefer to go younger. He is likely one of those players where you got good value out of him and then you move on.
To me, Pearson is one of the candidates whom you should be able to trade. His salary is reasonable, he's coming off a productive season, and he only has one year left on his contract. He also just returned to the playoffs and did relatively well. Trading him for a pick clears up $3.75M in cap space and you're not trading a long term piece here. As for his potential replacements, Ferland if he can stay healthy can slot in on left wing. So can Virtanen if he's every allowed to play the left side. Roussel would be a step down offensively but has played on Horvat's wing before. There's a lot of uncertainty and risk there of course. You trade Pearson and lose Tofolli and our top 6 wingers consist of Miller, Boeser and the guys I just mentioned (perhaps throw Gaudette in there).
Wow, we agree completely here.
I have no problems with Pearson and in a perfect world if other bad contracts weren't causing a problem I'd be happy to keep him around to finish out his contract.
But in our current situation, he should literally be the first player we're looking to move. There is basically zero chance we re-sign him next summer (or that it's a good idea to re-sign him). We're going to be in even more of a cap crunch with the new Hughes/Pettersson contracts and signing a slow 29 y/o 40-point winger for $4 million+ into his declining years will not be a good option at that point.
We've caught a huge break that this player who we acquired as a negative-value cap dump has turned himself back into a positive-value asset (on the back of a ton of EN points) and we should be doing everything we can to sell high. It's frankly bonkers to be talking about dumping Stecher/Virtanen types who make substantially less than Pearson and have years of team control and utility ahead of them so we can keep Pearson around for 1 more year before releasing him.
Also, I don't think people really realize how badly he played to close out the regular season and through the playoffs. From February 1 onward, once you take out EN points he was 35-7-3-10 -18 while being chained to Horvat in top-6 minutes the entire time. He basically turned back into the 18-19 version of himself.