NHL Rumors: Chicago Blackhawks, and the Vancouver Canucks

Will the Chicago Blackhawks go bridge or long-term with Alex Vlasic?

Ben Pope of the Chicago Sun-Times: Chicago Blackhawks pending RFA defenseman Alex Vlasic said that extension talks haven’t gone “too deep.” The sides will have to decide if they want to go with a bridge deal or something long-term term.

“But definitely thinking about it,” he said. “It’s in the back of my head right now. Hopefully at the end of the year, I’ll be able to work something out.”

Was trading Elias Pettersson ever really an option? The Canucks initial plan was to re-sign Elias Lindholm but has that changed?

Pierre LeBrun of The Athletic: The Vancouver Canucks showed interest in Chris Tanev and Jake Guentzel at the trade deadline, but obviously didn’t land them. Canucks GM Patrik Allvin can’t name players, but it’s believed they weren’t interested in giving up the assets that teams were asking for.

Forward Elias Pettersson is signed to a big contract extension. Allvin when asked if trading Pettersson was really an option for them.

“I mean, again, my job is to try to be ahead of things, and yeah, teams are calling when there’s a player like that who potentially is walking into his last year as (an) RFA and we’ve seen other teams who have struggled signing players like that,” Allvin said without naming Matthew Tkachuk and his forced exit out of Calgary two years ago as an RFA one year away from UFA status.

“So, I don’t know … but we’re very happy to get him signed.”

Elias Lindholm‘s transition to Canucks hasn’t been as smooth as the Canucks and Lindholm may have hoped.

“Initially when we made the deal, I talked to his camp and said our intention was to sign him,” Allvin said. “But obviously it’s got to work for both sides. We’ll see. I think it’s been a little bit of an adjustment time for him. And in fairness, the whole team hasn’t played great, we knew we were going to have a tough February schedule workload-wise, it was heavy and we got out of it with a .500 record which is the reason we’re still sitting at the top I think.

“But as I said earlier, we’ve got guys who haven’t played in important games in March.”

The Canucks have a pretty big list of pending UFAs that they’ll need to make decisions on Lindholm, Nikita Zadorov, Casey DeSmith, Dakota Joshua, Sam Lafferty, Teddy Blueger, Tyler Myers and Ian Cole.