We’ve got a confession to make: before tonight, we had never heard of David Pope.

He is, apparently, a 25-year-old left winger who until tonight was a prospect in the Detroit Red Wings system.

The Red Wings selected Pope in the fourth-round of the 2013 NHL Entry Draft. He spent four years at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, leading the team in scoring in his last season with the college.

He split last season between the Grand Rapids Griffins of the AHL (28 games, three points), and the Toledo Walleye of the ECHL (four points in seven games).

He’s clearly a fringe AHLer at this stage of his career, and the Canucks are probably hoping to add some forward depth in Utica. Or in the ECHL with the Kalamazoo Wings.

Scouting reports have been high on Pope’s shot, and note that he has NHL size (some sites have him listed at six-feet, three-inches and 205 pounds).

Obviously his first season playing pro didn’t go as planned, but Pope actually seems like a decent reclamation project. Let’s hope he can pull it together, whether he’s in the AHL or the ECHL.

https://twitter.com/DhaliwalSports/status/1181052321255477248

If Pope is something of an unknown, Alex Biega is not. The Canucks know what they had in the hard-working defenceman. It’s a touch sad to see him go, but with the team signing Oscar Fantenberg to fill the extra defenceman role—and with a steady crop of defenders in Utica ready for fill-in duty—there just wasn’t room for Bulldog anymore.

He was always a reliable soldier for the Canucks, who will miss his tenacity on nights where they didn’t have any jump (and god knows there were many in the last four or five years).

Detroit’s defence corps isn’t exactly stacked, so Biega might have a shot at being a regular in the Reg Wings lineup. We’re sure we speak for every Canucks fan when we wish him the best in Detroit.

Grade: B

The Canucks had already dropped Biega to waivers, so this is like taking a shot at a prospect for free, essentially. The start of the season is a busy time for waivers, and apparently other teams were interested in Biega after the fact, so maybe Canucks general manager Jim Benning and his scouts see something they really like in Pope.

It's a decent roll of the dice in exchange for a player who wasn't going to figure in the Canucks' future plans.

Follow @ncaddell on Twitter