The Summer of Jim is going a lot better than the . Jim Benning continued his solid summer work with restricted free agents by re-signing Canucks forward Brendan Gaunce to a two-year, one-way contract with an average annual value of $750,000.
Benning , showing atypical restraint with a reasonable one-year contract worth $3.5 million. Then he to give him another shot after a knee injury wiped out last season. After that, it was near-league-minimum deals for , and , providing options for the bottom of the roster that won’t break the bank.
Now Brendan Gaunce returns, coming in at below his qualifying offer on a two-year deal. All that’s left is Bo Horvat, which is an understandably harder contract to negotiate. Laurence Gilman suggested that fans should ; my guess is $5.5 million on a 6 year deal.
The Gaunce deal makes sense for both parties: the Canucks get a defensively-sound fourth-line forward with potential for growth on a cheap contract. His qualifying offer would have been at least $874,125 on a one-year deal; getting two years at over $100,000 savings is a nice bit of business for Benning.
As an added bonus, Gaunce will still be a restricted free agent when his contract expires, so if he does break out sometime in the next two seasons, the Canucks will still be in a strong negotiating position.
For Gaunce, he gets some security. Even if his underlying statistics were very good — Gaunce had the highest corsi percentage of any Canucks forward to play more than 200 minutes last season — he still played 57 games without scoring a single goal, so he didn’t have a strong argument to make for more money or years. Getting two years on one-way deal gives him some assurance that he’s still considered part of the Canucks future.
, the Canucks had extended the deadline for Gaunce to accept his qualifying offer from July 15th to August 15th to allow for more time to negotiate a new contract. Clearly the Canucks put a priority on re-signing Gaunce for two years, but wanted to go below the minimum set by the RFA rules on qualifying offers.
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