Canucks Have Changed Very Little

The Canucks haven't been the biggest of players in the off-season, especially with locking up the Sedin twins to long-term deals with a fairly big cap hit each. They did manage to attract Mikael Samuelsson to the West Coast from the Motor City. He should be looking to lock up a second-line job on the team this coming year. The Canucks also added Andrew Raycroft to a small deal to back-up Roberto Luongo, which doesn't exactly build too much confidence in the back-up role, but he is NHL tested at least. That has been the bulk of the changes seen thus far, but with some of the number crunching, they may need to move someone to fit some more in.

Forwards	Defense	Goaltenders
Daniel Sedin	Kevin Bieksa	Roberto Luongo
Henrik Sedin	Alex Edler	Andrew Raycroft
Ryan Kesler	Sami Salo
Pavol Demitra	Willie Mitchell
Alex Burrows	Shane O'Brien
Mikael Samuelsson
Steve Bernier
Mason Raymond
Ryan Johnson
Darcy Hordichuk
Rick Rypien

The listed Canucks roster has 18 players at a going rate of $52.7 million, meaning that there is only about $4 million for the remaining five players that the team needs to fill the 23-man roster. The team does have Cody Hodgson signed and ready-to-go, if they can fit him in, while there are some suitable defenders in the system who could likely fill a gap or two.

Kyle Wellwood will also be going to arbitration to figure out his next deal for the 2010 season, which has some potential for being bad for the Canucks bookkeeping, but we'll wait and see there. Jannik Hansen is also up for free agency.

It's hard to say that the Canucks will be better fantasy-wise at this point, but Samuelsson may come out as somewhat of a sleeper, especially with a larger role for Vancouver. He'll be one to watch.