The ‘strong possibility’ of Pierre Dorion as Canucks GM, draft lottery stakes and Markus Naslund

Vancouver Canucks fans should be taking the prospect of former Senators general manager Pierre Dorion emerging as the next Canucks GM very seriously.

The veteran executive was interviewed in person for the job, according to a report from TSN’s Darren Dreger. That’s a telling indication of Dorion’s standing in this ongoing search, and two sources confirmed to The Athletic that Dorion’s candidacy isn’t just a matter of the Canucks doing due diligence.

That Dorion could legitimately succeed Patrik Allvin as Vancouver’s general manager is, as one league source put it to The Athletic on Monday, “a strong possibility.”

Dorion’s emergence as a contender for the Canucks job has come out of left field. Since being fired by Ottawa in November 2023, Dorion hasn’t been actively employed by an NHL team, and his name never became public during Vancouver’s preliminary round of interviews.

It’s worth considering, then, given the stakes of this general manager search for the Canucks, Dorion’s time with the Senators.

In breaking down Dorion’s record, it’s useful to start at the top. When Bryan Murray retired, and Dorion took over as Ottawa’s GM in April 2016, he inherited the following players on an 85-point team:

• 25-year-old Erik Karlsson with three years remaining on a contract with a $6.5 million cap hit;
• 23-year-old Mark Stone with two years remaining on a contract with a $3.5 million cap hit;
• 26-year-old Mike Hoffman, who was a restricted free agent that summer;
• 29-year-old Bobby Ryan, who was one year into a seven-year, $50.75 million contract;
• 22-year-old Mika Zibanejad has one year remaining on a contract with a $2.625 million cap hit;
• 23-year-old J.G. Pageau with one year remaining on a contract with a $900,000 cap hit.

That first summer, Dorion traded a third-round pick to move up one spot at the 2016 NHL Draft and select centre Logan Brown. He dealt Alex Chiasson for quadruple-A defender Patrick Sieloff. He topped up Zibanejad with a second-round draft pick and sent that package to the Rangers for a much older third-line centre in Derick Brassard and a seventh-round pick.

Then, as the season went along, Dorion bolstered his roster with trade deadline acquisitions of Alex Burrows and Viktor Stalberg at the cost of Jonathan Dahlen and a third-round pick, then waved the white flag on recent Senators first-round pick Curtis Lazar, sending him to Calgary in return for depth defender Jyrki Jokipakka and a second-rounder.

That spring, the Senators caught fire. Karlsson, with his lacerated Achilles tendon injury behind him, played like the best defenceman in the world. Stone was dominant. Hoffman was virtually unstoppable off the rush.

The Senators got to within a goal of the Stanley Cup Final, falling short in overtime to Sidney Crosby’s Penguins in the conference final.

Ottawa didn’t make the playoffs again with Dorion as general manager, and over that time, his work was decidedly mixed.

A desperation acquisition of Matt Duchene in the summer of 2018, followed by the team falling apart the next season, cost the Senators Kyle Turris and a top-five pick (Bowen Byram).

First-round picks that could’ve supported the Karlsson/Stone core like Brown, Shane Bowers and Lassi Thompson busted. A lengthy second contract handed out to Colin White as a 10.2(c) black hole player was bought out.

Stone was sold to the Golden Knights on a bizarre timeline and for cents on the dollar. A misguided purchase of Alex DeBrincat, when he was one year out from the expiry of his bridge contract, cost Dorion a top-10 pick. When DeBrincat, rather predictably, was unwilling to commit to remaining long-term, Dorion’s Senators were unable to recoup the price they paid in trading him to Detroit.

There were some wins in there, too. The Karlsson trade with the Sharks was a home run that netted the club Tim Stützle. While there were some significant drafting misses during his tenure in the first round, Dorion also oversaw some solid draft picks once the Senators committed to rebuilding, landing Drake Batherson in the fourth round in 2017, Shane Pinto in the second round in 2019 and nailing three first-round picks in a loaded 2020 Senators draft class.

I’ll admit to a bias here, but as I’m generally hesitant to credit GMs for their work at the draft — drafting is a collaborative process, and the best GMs hire the best scouts to make picks and merely oversee the process, which is necessary given the contemporary complexities of the job — many of Dorion’s best moves aren’t ones I too heavily weigh in his favour.

When you look back at what Dorion inherited in Ottawa, it appears to me to be that he took over a very promising portfolio and made far too little of it. He then bungled through a rebuild that failed to launch, and after his departure from the organization, left his successor, Steve Staois, with a top-heavy team that had too small a handful of star contributors, who were insufficiently supported by the volume of talent required to properly contend.

The overall work product for Dorion in Ottawa is thin, and that’s even before we get into his failure to be aware of or disclose Evgenii Dadonov’s 10-team no-trade protection before trading him to Vegas in 2021. It was an oversight that caused the NHL to penalize the Senators a first-round draft pick (that penalty, after significant lobbying from Senators owner Michael Andlauer, was conditionally rescinded this season).

It’s very difficult to believe that Vancouver couldn’t find a more suitable candidate to replace Allvin.

Markus Naslund isn’t involved in this process

I checked in on legendary Canucks sniper Markus Naslund in the wake of the Toronto Maple Leafs’ move to hire Mats Sundin as a senior consultant this week. Naslund’s name had been conjectured locally to be involved in Vancouver’s process to find a new general manager, or potentially a new head of hockey operations.

Naslund told The Athletic late last week that he has at no point been involved in this search.

The 52-year-old had a five-year run as the general manager of MODO, the professional team in Örnsköldsvik, Sweden, where he still lives (and where the Sedin twins also hail from). However, his tenure concluded in 2014, and Naslund hasn’t been actively engaged in professional hockey since.

Ryan Johnson and Vancouver’s AA play

The more names I hear around this Canucks process, the more I’m convinced that Vancouver’s best option is to promote Ryan Johnson.

Some really intriguing young assistant general managers have been interviewed, including the Lightning’s Jeff Tambellini, the Panthers’ Brett Peterson and the Bruins’ Evan Gold. However, Johnson’s resume and track record stack up well in comparison with any of them.

One thing stands out to me, however, in considering Johnson’s work in Abbotsford, and it’s the way he’s gone about building sort of an AA layer for Vancouver’s player development apparatus since the team relocated to the Fraser Valley.

Effectively, what the Canucks have done under Johnson’s purview is create a new developmental pathway to the NHL by targeting unheralded, generally high point-producing players, usually from western Canada and signing them to AHL contracts. Chase Wouters, Tristen Nielsen (who has gone on to play NHL games and is on his second NHL standard player contract), Quinn Schmiemann, Cooper Walker, Joe Arntsen and recently top NCAA prospect Bennett Schimek are among the players the club has handled in this manner.

Not only has this low-stakes approach turned up an NHL-level depth player in Nielsen, but it’s helped Abbotsford sustain success and have a baseline of talent to operate with regardless of how many injuries occur at the NHL level. The club flat-out doesn’t win the Calder Cup, for example, without the contributions of Wouters and Walker, in particular.

At every step of the way — from the promising scoring profiles of the players Abbotsford has signed to the clever deployment of non-NHL personnel resources to create a new player development pathway — you can see evidence of the sort of advanced thinking that contemporary hockey leadership requires.

When you throw in Johnson’s polished skills as a communicator, the 2025 Abbotsford championship — and since 2013, the list of Calder Cup-winning general managers includes Julien BriseBois, Kyle Dubas, Bill Zito and Jim Nill, a very impressive group of executives — and his track record identifying depth players in free agency that go on to contribute itn the NHL for the Canucks, you have a very compelling case that Johnson could easily outperform a more experienced candidate.

In fact, he’s a far better profile bet to provide the franchise with real value in a leadership role than just about all of the external candidates the Canucks have interviewed.

The stakes of the draft lottery

It will feel like a huge loss for the Canucks if they fall to third in the 2026 NHL Draft, but this pick is already Vancouver’s most valuable asset, and where exactly it lands isn’t something to fixate on.

Obviously, Gavin McKenna is a special prospect, and if the Canucks were to draft him, that would electrify this market significantly. There’s huge value in that.

McKenna alone, however, isn’t enough to turn the Canucks around. No matter how the lottery balls bounce on Tuesday, the Canucks are still going to need to go about landing 2-3 elite players capable of being cornerstones of the next great Vancouver team.

That player could be McKenna; he’d certainly be the best bet in the 2026 draft class to hit that level, but it could also be Ivar Stenberg, Chase Reid, Caleb Malhotra, Carson Carels or Keaton Verhoeff.

By virtue of finishing in 32nd, the Canucks have guaranteed themselves a top-three pick, with the upside of having the most favourable odds to secure the first or second pick.

Winning the lottery would be a bonus, but that’s it. The Canucks are going to get a terrific prospect either way, and the pain of this season will be paid off regardless of whether Vancouver lands at first, second or third in the draft order.