Canucks: Will contract peace bring Brock Boeser his best season yet?

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No more bridge deals. No more questions about what will happen at the coming trade deadline.

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Just a focus on how the team is getting ready. How he can lead his team to the promised land.

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Welcome to the rest of your life, Brock Boeser.

“I just want to play hockey,” Boeser said, grinning, Monday before teeing off at the Vancouver Canucks’ annual Jake Milford charity golf tournament.

He’s got his security. He held his ground in what he thought he was worth, and in the end, Canucks management were forced to agree, getting his signature on a seven-year deal that will average $7.25 million US per season.

He will be 35 when it expires.

Now that’s removed from his life, you would expect, it will make for a more settled player, a player more comfortable in setting a tone.

Last season, with his name constantly in trade rumours, he said it was hard to truly set himself as a leader. His presence drew notice of the coaching staff, nonetheless, and he was added to the assistant-captain rotation after J.T. Miller was traded away.

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“It sucks. You’re always preparing for something that never ended up happening,” he said. And with that cast away, hopefully permanently, those mental energies can now be focused on being the top-end winger the Canucks are paying him to be. He has been a consistent scorer since he made his debut in 2017. For a couple seasons, maintaining full health was a challenge. Then there was the emotional drain of his father’s declining health, which only ended with his dad’s passing.

Rare has been the season where there hasn’t been something else going on for Boeser.

And yet he has scored 204 goals in 554 career games, literally a 30-goal pace over 82 games. That’s nothing to sniff at.

This season he looks likely to play with Elias Pettersson. That will make for some adjustments for Boeser. He has had success playing with the Swede in the past, but for much of the last three seasons or so, he was stapled on J.T. Miller’s wing, including for his epic 40-goal season in 2023-24. (A campaign, you may recall, that also saw Miller caught offside a handful of times, which negated would-be goals for Boeser.)

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Tyler Myers was among the teammates who Boeser consulted with as he was pondering his future last spring, before the Canucks made their final contract offer on the eve of free agency. He knew there would be good offers out there, that perhaps he might want to consider playing somewhere new. But in the end, he stayed.

“A bunch of us talked to him about where we were as a group,” Myers said Monday, his happiness for his friend all too obvious. “We’re really happy with the trajectory that we’re on, and we want to keep building off of that.”

If the Canucks are going to succeed this year, it will be because of a resurgent Pettersson, who had his worst-ever season last campaign, plus continued consistent finishing from Boeser.

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Everyone knows it, and Boeser isn’t shy about it — they didn’t score enough last season. They didn’t create enough scoring chances, whether it was on the rush or in the zone.

They just need to be better. He knows it. His teammates know it.

And it’s all he has to think about now.

The half-full take

Boeser is an optimist’s dream. Everyone around him will tell you that with his good nature, his positive outlook, he comes by these things honestly.

It’s a spirit that has powered him through all the personal challenges he has faced since he was in his teens.

He’s also been healthier the last two seasons.

Between his health, his attitude and his lack of distractions, there is every reason to think that he will be a powerful force for this team in 2025-26, between on-ice ability and uplifting leadership.

The half-empty take

The pessimist will note Boeser’s well-discussed lack of foot speed, the fact this is a team that has only had a couple of good seasons over his time in the NHL, no matter who has been on the roster, that he’s now at the end of his 20s, heading toward his 30s.

That is real negative-nelly talk about a guy who is truly one of hockey’s good guys, though.

pjohnston@postmedia.com

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