Canucks might just be stuck with Loui Eriksson, and his contract

The Vancouver Canucks ponied up for Loui Eriksson a few summers ago, and now they’re stuck with an increasingly bad player and a bloated contract.

Entering Friday’s action, the Vancouver Canucks are 10 points back of the second Wild Card spot in the Western Conference with 12 games left. So they should have an eye beyond this season, but it’s worth wondering where they’d be if they had gotten even mediocre output from winger Loui  Eriksson this year.

Eriksson is the Canucks’ highest-paid player, with a $6 million salary and a $1 million bonus this year, as he nears the end of the third year of the six-year, $36 million contract he signed in July of 2016. But he has just 10 goals and 22 points in 69 games this season, as was a healthy scratch for the first time in his Vancouver career this past Wednesday night against the New York Rangers.

In 184 games for Vancouver, Eriksson has just 69 points (31 goals and 38 assists). That is almost equal to his final season with the Boston Bruins (2015-16), when he had 63 points (30 goals and 33 assists) in what feels more and more like a contract drive marked by some good fortune.. Eriksson tied his career-high with 10 power play goals that season, with a shooting percentage (16.3 percent) which stands as an outlier even compared to the handful of seasons that preceded it.

To the credit of Canucks’ head coach Travis Green, Eriksson is averaging just over 14 minutes of ice time per game this season. A -11 plus-minus is never easy to absorb, but when set next to Vancouver’s overall goal differential of -27 Eriksson has clearly been a detriment.

Via Cap Friendly, Eriksson carries matching salary cap hits of $6 million in each of the next three seasons. He also has a full no-trade clause for next season, with modified no-trade clauses (a 15-team list Eriksson will submit) for the remaining two seasons of his contract.

So trading Eriksson next season is a complete dead end, unless he waives the no-trade clause. After that, a draft pick will surely have to be attached to get rid of him.

A buyout is possible, but the Canucks would still take on cap hits of $5.5 million in each of the next two seasons and a $3.5 million cap hit in 2021-22. For four years after Eriksson’s deal expires, via Spotrac, Vancouver would have $500,000 cap hits each year. So the $500,000 saved over the next two years via a buyout would bite the Canucks (and then some) on the back end.

Eriksson was nearly 31 years old when he signed with Vancouver, so a six-year deal was easy to see as a bad contract once he got into his mid-30’s and it’s not too surprising it’s been bad for the Canucks right from the start. Now they’re stuck with an increasingly ineffective player, and a bloated contract general manager Jim Benning will have a hard time getting rid of.