Loui Eriksson’s retired: The 10 worst contracts in Canucks history

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Loui Eriksson has officially retired.

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A year and a half after he last stepped on the ice, the former Vancouver Canuck has confirmed what many probably assumed at this point: he has retired.

“Hockey has given me more than I could have ever imagined,” he said in a statement released Monday via CAA, his old agency. “I’ve had the highest of highs and lowest of lows, but at the end of the day, I’m so thankful for the memories that I’m bringing as I walk away from the game of hockey.”

He last played for Frolunda of the Swedish Hockey League in 2022-23. His last season in the NHL was 2021-22 with the Arizona Coyotes. That was also the last year of the six-year contract he signed with the Canucks in 2016.

Eriksson was a quality scorer for the Dallas Stars from 2008 until 2012, then he became a Boston Bruin in 2013. After a couple of middling seasons in Beantown, he had a near-career season in 2015-16, scoring 30 goals on the back of the second-best shooting percentage of his career.

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It never worked in Vancouver. Over his five seasons in Vancouver, he scored 38 goals — in other words he made just under $1 million per goal scored.

In recognition of the official end of Eriksson’s career, let’s review the 10 worst contracts in Canucks history.

Eriksson (2016 free agent signing for $6 million per season)

A contract that has been discussed many, many times, but here’s a new angle.

In 2010-11, the Sedin twins were the Canucks’ highest-paid players.

In 2016-17, they remained the highest-paid Canucks.

No surprise there.

And it’s no surprise that Ryan Kesler was the third-highest paid Canuck during that epic 2010-11 season.

Do you see where we’re going here?

In 2016-17 the third highest-paid Canuck was … Loui Eriksson.

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After scoring those 38 goals across his first four seasons, he barely played during the 2020-21 season, spending most of that year on the taxi squad or on the COVID list. He appeared in just seven games that season and didn’t score a goal. He was traded to Arizona that summer along with Antoine Roussel, Jay Beagle and a first-round pick for Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Conor Garland.

Vladimir Krutov (1989 free agent signing for $375,000 per season)

The first true dud acquisition in Canucks history.

After a multi-year courtship of Soviet hockey officials by Canucks ownership and management, in the summer of 1989 the Canucks thought they had struck double gold in signing Krutov and his longtime linemate Igor Larionov.

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Larionov proved to be a solid pickup, although the Canucks foolishly left him unprotected in the 1992 waiver draft after Larionov signed with a team in Switzerland. When he returned to North America, he was a San Jose Shark before going on to fame and fortune with the Detroit Red Wings.

Even so, he was a success for the Canucks. Krutov was not.

Liberated from the Soviet hockey machine, he showed up to his first training camp badly out of shape and never really caught up. He scored 11 goals and added 23 assists in 61 games, rarely providing the power or creativity he had shown in international play for the USSR. Stories abounded about how much he drank and how badly he ate.

Former Province columnist Ed Willes pondered in his recent Canucks history book “Never Boring” whether an under-discussed factor in Krutov’s failure in Vancouver was about him no longer being in the Soviet doping empire as much as anything else.

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Whatever the cause, he showed up a year later to training camp and the Canucks insisted he wasn’t fit to play and terminated his contract. He sued the Canucks, and with the help of Vancouver lawyer Bill Faminoff, ended up winning a big payout from the Canucks in front of an international arbitrator.

Marc Chouinard (2006 free agent signing for $1.1 million per season)

A big centre coming off two solid seasons centring the third line in Minnesota, he seemed like he would be a good fit as a depth centre behind Brendan Morrison and Henrik Sedin. But he proved to be a disaster. After scoring in double digits for Minnesota the previous two seasons, he scored just twice for the Canucks in 42 games.

The emergence of Ryan Kesler — although the sophomore suffered a torn hip labrum in January 2007 — plus the acquisition of Bryan Smolinski made Chouinard expendable. He finished the season in the minors and GM Dave Nonis bought out Chouinard’s contract after the season. It was an ugly and needless roster misfire by Nonis, who would only last one more season as GM.

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Chouinard wouldn’t play in the NHL again.

Jay Beagle (2018 free agent signing for $3 million per season)

Four years for a checking centre, many bleated in the summer of 2018. And they weren’t wrong. Jay Beagle was a decent teammate and solid faceoff man, but the problem was everything else — he’d have to play hockey.

Jim Benning insisted that Beagle would bring culture to the room and that would be enough. But investing so much money in a player who spent most of the game sitting on the bench was a brutally inefficient use of cap space.

Beagle would get shipped to Arizona for the final year of his deal.

Mathieu Schneider (2009 free agent signing for $1.55 million per season)

A year after hitting a solid double in signing a talented-but-aging veteran Mats Sundin to add experienced depth to his squad, GM Mike Gillis tried again with a former client.

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At 40, it was a long shot that the highly skilled defenceman would pan out — and that proved to be the case. He didn’t even make it to Christmas. He started the season on the injured list, recovering from shoulder surgery.

And by the time he was ready, Christian Ehrhoff had himself firmly planted in the primary power-play quarterback role. When Schneider signed at the end of August, the path to the power play looked to be Schneider’s, but three weeks later Gillis pounced on the Sharks’ salary cap crisis and snagged Ehrhoff in a trade. Schneider didn’t take being shoved into a depth role well, and while his offensive talents were still there, too often he proved to be a defensive liability and became a regular healthy scratch.

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Schneider walked out on the Canucks after a Dec. 20 game, but accepted being sent to AHL Manitoba in early January — so he could collect his bonus cheque. After two months, the Canucks were able to flip him to Arizona at the deadline.

Mark Messier (1997 free agent signing for $6 million per season)

The signing that Pat Quinn didn’t want to make ended up playing a big role in Quinn’s demise. A year after ownership fouled up the pursuit of Wayne Gretzky, owner John McCaw and his chief lieutenant Stan McCammon set their sights on signing another famed former Oiler, the man who led the New York Rangers to victory over the Canucks in 1994: Mark Messier.

Hailed as hockey’s great leader, the spin was that even at 36, Messier would add juice to the Canucks’ offence and solidify the team’s leadership group — and that it would all add up to the right mix to get back to Stanley Cup contention.

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But the 1997-98 Canucks turned into a tire fire. The veteran core of the team didn’t jibe with Messier at all — Gino Odjick accused Messier of just collecting cheques in the early going — and after a brutal start, Quinn was fired, and then so was coach Tom Renney shortly thereafter.

Mike Keenan was hand-picked by Messier to take over as coach. Keenan’s reputation as a coach who leaned on internal terror to drive his team was deserved — every team he had left over the previous decade had said “good riddance” once he was gone. Current Canucks coach Rick Tocchet has often said in hindsight he recognizes how important Keenan was for his career. Keenan was Tocchet’s first coach in Philadelphia, but he was also critical of his coach when Keenan was fired by the Flyers in 1988.

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“You can only whip some guys so much before you can’t revive them. It got to the point where guys couldn’t respond,” Tocchet said.

Keenan’s style failed to revive the Canucks and so instead he began dismantling the roster. Despite the pain felt by the veterans of ’94, in trading away the likes of Trevor Linden and Odjick, Keenan did lay some of the foundation for the West Coast Express years.

In the midst of this, some of the young players have said that Messier was a valuable teammate. Take Markus Näslund: “He taught us a lot … the one thing I respect about Mark is how he cared for each and every one of us.”

Messier was far from the scoring star he once was, but he finished top three in scoring for the Canucks during each of his three seasons here. Faint praise given how poorly the team performed during each of those seasons.

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Barry Pederson (1986 trade, signed for $350,000 per season)

It’s perhaps a little unfair to include Pederson here, who scored at a point per game clip after joining the Canucks in a trade with the Boston Bruins. He was a free agent, but in those days, would have drawn heavy compensation of essentially the Bruins’ choosing. So Canucks GM Jack Gordon opted to negotiate a trade for Pederson, then signed him to a deal that made Pederson the 10th-highest paid player in the league for the 1986-87 season, at least according to research by SPORT magazine in 1987.

And that is how Cam Neely and Glen Wesley became Bruins.

Pederson had been a elite scorer his first three seasons with the Bruins. He set a slew of rookie scoring records for Boston and was runner-up for the Calder trophy as the NHL’s top rookie. He got even better the next two seasons, putting him on par with future Hall of Famers like Dale Hawerchuk, Michel Goulet, Denis Savard and Ron Francis. But things turned for him in the summer of 1984 when a benign tumour was found in his shoulder and he needed two operations to remove it.

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He was never the same player. He was a decent though unspectacular player for the Canucks, but not the game-changer that Neely would become.

Pat Quinn traded him and Tony Tanti to the Penguins in 1990.

Tyler Myers (2019 free agent, $6 million per season)

In retrospect, and this will drive many wild, we’ve been a little harsh on the Chaos Giraffe.

Another Jim Benning signing, Myers was always going to be defined by the size of the contract he was signed to in 2019.

Myers was never going to be a No. 1 defenceman. When he was at his best in Winnipeg, where he was playing before signing with the Canucks in the summer of 2019, he was the Jets’ fourth defenceman.

His contract tied him with Alex Edler as the Canucks’ highest-paid blueliner right from the start. Here’s the thing, though: although he’s never been able to carry a pairing himself, he’s been a very good partner for specific defencemen. He was an excellent partner for Edler in 2019-20. And he’s been a solid partner for Quinn Hughes when they have played together.

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But a two-year stretch with Oliver Ekman-Larsson was rough. The Canucks were constantly chasing the game with the duo on the ice.

Myers now makes half what he did, and the assessment of fans is now much more reasonable. He’s almost a beloved figure at this point.

Oliver Ekman-Larsson (2021 trade, $8.25 million per season)

Jim Benning believed OEL could be a No. 1 defenceman again. He was wrong.

OEL is a lovely guy. And outside of his two years in Vancouver has had a very fine career. But his time in Vancouver was a disaster. The team struggled on the ice. Benning and coach Travis Green were shown the door in December. Bruce Boudreau, Green’s replacement, lasted just over a year.

Ekman-Larsson was average at best his first season — and then he broke his foot on world championships duty for Sweden. That injury turned his second season into a disaster.

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GM Patrik Allvin bought him out post-season, deciding against gambling that Ekman-Larsson could find his game again.

Of course, the Swede proved to be a solid depth defenceman for the Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers and now is a useful player for the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Braden Holtby (2020 signing, $4.3 million per season)

After Benning was priced out from re-signing Jacob Markstrom in the 2020 off-season because ownership imposed a reduced spending budget, the Canucks needed a goalie. Holtby, who had been one of the league’s best goalies for the previous decade, was brought in to job-share with Thatcher Demko.

In keeping with the team’s overall awful season, Holtby posted the worst save percentage of his career. He was bought out after the season, then played one more year for the Dallas Stars before retiring.

pjohnston@postmedia.com

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