The Summer of Jim is going a lot better than the Summer of George. 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 started with Erik Gudbranson, showing atypical restraint with a reasonable one-year contract worth $3.5 million. Then he brought back Anton Rodin to give him another shot after a knee injury wiped out last season. After that, it was near-league-minimum deals for Evan McEneny, Michael Chaput, and Reid Boucher, 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 expect a contract north of $5 million; 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.
According to a report from Rick Dhaliwal, 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.
