What we’re hearing about Brock Boeser on the trade block, Bo Horvat and more

There’s no nice way to put it, this is shaping up to be a nightmare season for the Vancouver Canucks.

Though the hockey club defeated the Arizona Coyotes on Saturday night, their form was poor and attendance was uncommonly sparse for a Saturday night game during the holiday season.

Off-ice controversy, key injuries, poor on-ice performance, internal misalignment and timeline overruns with the locker room renovation — it’s been an exceedingly challenging season for the Canucks. Internally, there haven’t been many good days of late.

Unfortunately, there’s no immediate relief in sight. The club faces a host of difficult decisions in the weeks and months to come and the drama that unfolded with Brock Boeser on Saturday night hints at the outline of what’s to come.

It’s now clear for all to see that this Canucks team is in need of significant change.

The Canucks hockey operations group, led by Jim Rutherford and Patrik Allvin, still believes strongly in the high-end abilities of a select group of Vancouver’s top players. They still don’t view an all-out rebuild as an unavoidable necessity, but there’s a recognition that the club can’t continue to move forward with their current mix of players.

The club isn’t prepared to move their most valuable trade chips just yet, however, and those players that the club would prefer to move are expensive supporting pieces — the list includes Boeser, in addition to Tyler Myers, Conor Garland and Tanner Pearson — that all come attached to expensive contracts with term remaining and, with the exception of Garland, some limited no-trade protection built into their deals.

Our understanding is that Boeser’s status on the trade block isn’t new, although it’s clearly a situation that’s been given a sense of fresh urgency now that — as Elliotte Friedman first reported on Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday — Boeser’s agent, Ben Hankinson of Octagon Player Representation, has been given permission by the club to explore trade options with other clubs on his client’s behalf.

In digging into this situation on Sunday, The Athletic has confirmed that Boeser hasn’t requested a trade.

It’s mostly a coincidence that the Boeser trade reports surfaced on the same day that Boeser was due to be a healthy scratch for the first time since 2017, but it’s not a surprise that dialogue between the player’s camp and the Canucks has kicked up in recent weeks. Boeser of late has been dropped off of the first power-play unit, and onto a bottom-six line with Sheldon Dries, which is the sort of change in usage that often stimulates these sorts of conversations.

Still, this isn’t a situation where there’s ill feeling. Rather, the team and Boeser’s camp have, over the course of discussions about Boeser’s role and his Canucks future — conversations which date back to the club’s negotiations on Boeser’s current three-year deal this past offseason — mutually agreed to see if…