Jake DeBrusk says he never asked the Vancouver Canucks for a trade, despite a full season of rumors following him around.
Insider Rick Dhaliwal dropped that detail Saturday night, and it lands right as Vancouver tries to figure out what it even has heading into next season.
DeBrusk posted 23 goals and 19 assists for 42 points in 81 games last year. Not bad production for a guy who spent half the year fielding trade questions.
His term was the real issue, according to the report. Teams reportedly liked the player. They just did not love the contract attached to him.
And that is the brutal math of pending term in this league. You can score every night and still get whispered about because of the paper, not the play.
DeBrusk finished strong too. He put up 8 points in his final 10 games, nothing close to the minus-31 rating he carried across the full season.
That kind of split, ice cold for months then hot down the stretch, is exactly the profile that keeps rumor mills spinning every single deadline.
Vancouver term debate follows DeBrusk into a new era
Manny Malhotra takes over as Vancouver head coach this fall, and he inherits every one of these storylines whether he likes it or not.
DeBrusk carries a cap hit of 5.5 million dollars, hardly a burden by todays standards, but term length was apparently the sticking point for interested clubs.
Vancouver just finished 25-49-8, dead last in the league standings at 32nd overall. That is not a roster you break up quietly either.
Elias Pettersson still eats up 11.6 million dollars on that same forward group, and the Canucks cannot keep adding term without a real plan attached.
No team ever got close on DeBrusk, according to the report. That tells you the rumors were noise more than anything close to real interest.
But noise still follows a player into a new season, into a new locker room under a new coach, and into every conversation reporters have with him.
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Malhotra now has to decide how DeBrusk fits into his top six, and whether a full offseason of speculation changes anything about his role on this roster.
Should the Canucks have moved Jake DeBrusk at last season deadline anyway?
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