At the start of the season, it seemed like the Vancouver Canucks could be in for something of a shortage at the centre position.

It wasn't known whether Elias Pettersson would be able to start at centre right away, and Adam Gaudette was sent down to start the year with the Utica Comets. 

As we near the dregs of what will be a fourth straight year without a playoff berth, the opposite looks to be true for the Canucks’ upcoming campaign.

With Pettersson and Bo Horvat forming one of the better young centre duos in the league, and Gaudette having unquestionably played himself on to the roster for good, there is only one centre spot left in the lineup.

Of course, the Canucks have two veteran pivots behind their three youngsters. Jay Beagle (three more years) and Brandon Sutter (two more) are both signed for multiple seasons at cap hits richer than their actual worth. And yeah, that Jay Beagle deal looks even worse now than it did in the summer (and it didn’t look great then).

So there’s a decision to be made. And though it seems like a certainty that Markus Granlund, who can play centre, won’t be back on the squad, there’s still a crowd in the middle.

The optics on getting rid of Beagle this soon after he signed a four-year contract would seem very bad. Plus, there’s the matter of whether anyone would actually take him on in a trade.

Getting Sutter off the roster doesn’t seem particularly simple either, but it would seem to be the way things are heading here. The veteran won’t play again this season as he required surgery for a sports hernia. It’s the second time Sutter has had to undergo this procedure.

Before his injury, it must be said that Sutter wasn’t particularly effective this year. Though Travis Green often uses him in a shutdown role against tough competition, his minus-12 in 26 games helps paint a picture of how that deployment went.

So what can be done?

It won’t be easy to trade Sutter, even if the Canucks retain some salary. Though his style of play and name still carries some weight, it’s just a fact that he’s struggled during most of the four seasons he’s spent in Vancouver. He’s also been plagued by injury since he’s been a Canuck; if he doesn’t play again this season (he won’t), he’ll have played 188 of a possible 328 contests.

Considering how much respect the Canucks have for him—he is an alternate captain, after all, and general manager Jim Benning did once use his name and Patrice Bergeron’s in the same sentence—a buyout seems somewhat unlikely.

But that could be the only option here if the Canucks want Sutter out of the lineup. Benning has said that the club sees Gaudette as a centre, so something has to give.

Unlike Loui Eriksson’s situation, buying out Sutter wouldn’t be completely pointless in that it would save the team some money. In all, the Canucks would save $2.33 million by buying out Sutter, though they would have to pay $1.166 million against the cap every year for the next four.

It’s not great, but is it better than paying $4.375 million against the cap for the next two years to have him clog up the roster?

He might be preferable to Beagle, but that’s not really a choice the Canucks can make anymore, not after signing the latter to a four-year deal.

If the Canucks can’t trade Sutter, moving on from him in the form of a buyout might be the best option. No one wants another Sam Gagner situation where he just sits in the minors mired in uncertainty.

*All cap related statistics via CapFriendly 
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