It appears Daniel Sprong will be returning to a team he’s already familiar with. The Canucks announced that they have dealt the winger to the Kraken in exchange for future considerations.
Sprong has been a productive player over the last couple of seasons but it hasn’t resulted in him getting much stability. In 2022-23, he had a breakout year in Seattle, notching 21 goals and 25 assists in 66 games. Before that, his previous career-high in points was 23. However, despite only being owed a qualifying offer of $787.5K, Seattle opted to non-tender him, getting out of a potential arbitration hearing in the process.
Still, the 27-year-old was able to do relatively well in free agency in 2023, landing a one-year, $2MM deal with Detroit. He showed that his production the year before wasn’t a one-off, as he collected 18 goals and 25 assists in 76 games while only averaging 12 minutes a night of action. But once again, he was non-tendered as the Red Wings opted to avoid the risk of arbitration as well.
Unfortunately for Sprong, the market wasn’t as strong this time around. It took nearly three weeks into free agency before he found a contract when Vancouver signed him to a one-year, $975K contract, cutting his pay from the year before by more than half in the process. It looked like a relatively shrewd pickup for a Canucks franchise that didn’t have much salary cap flexibility but wanted to add more offensive depth.
But things didn’t go as planned. Sprong has been healthy scratched three times already this season and when he has played, he hasn’t been able to produce at the same level, tallying just one goal and two assists in nine games while averaging 11:39 per night. Clearly, Vancouver had seen enough and decided the time was right to move on.
The Canucks are expected to welcome Dakota Joshua back to the lineup soon and it appears that this move will open up the roster spot to do so. In the meantime, they’ve upped their cap space to over $1.9MM per PuckPedia, giving them much more in-season flexibility than they’ve had in recent years. As for Seattle, they’re presently in LTIR and this move will push them a little deeper into it. However, they’re still close enough to the $88MM cap that it shouldn’t be too difficult to get back under that amount when Vince Dunn is able to return.
Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman was the first to report the trade.
There are a lot of teams in this league paying more than what Sprong would have gotten in arbitration for solid middle-six production.