Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misstated the circumstances for entering emergency conditions. NHL teams must first play a full game short a player in order to get a cap exemption for emergency conditions; teams cannot enter emergency conditions without this step.

Conor Garland doesn’t care, and that’s one of his best attributes.

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This is a very generously listed 5-foot-10 forward who has no problem choking up on his stick right to the blade at the net front. So what if it causes him to crouch over and look 5-foot-2? So what if it makes him more vulnerable to a big hit from a defender who seems to be twice his physical size? If it makes Garland more likely to score and if it makes his team win, he’ll do it every time. Because winning, that’s something Garland cares about.

On Tuesday, as the Canucks were on the ice at Rogers Arena for one final tune-up practice ahead of their regular-season opener, Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman reported that Garland’s agent — he recently replaced his longtime agent Peter Cooney with Judd Moldaver of Wasserman Hockey — had been granted permission by the Canucks to attempt to facilitate a trade for Garland.

On the eve of the season and in the wake of a mostly placid, drama-free Canucks training camp and preseason, the way the Garland reports surfaced felt like banging headlong into the turbulence of a storm’s eye wall.

It is, accordingly, tempting to overfit a sense of déjà vu to this latest instalment of apparent Canucks preseason drama. To stuff the latest Garland reports into the same circus tent in which our memories of Canucks preseasons gone off of the rails reside. There it is again that funny feeling, as Bo Burnham would have it.

In truth, the latest Garland reports and trade buzz aren’t a real distraction for this team. It’s not ideal, of course, but it’s also not significant. It’s small stuff, which shouldn’t cause Canucks fans or Canucks personnel to lose a single cubic ounce of perspiration.

After Friedman’s report on Tuesday, Garland stood with the media in the Canucks locker room for a relatively antagonistic — but completely polite — scrum. The media attempted to pin him down on whether he’d directly asked for a trade, and Garland repeatedly demurred while not denying the story.

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He discussed the tunnel vision players have in preparing for the season as a reason it was outside his purview. He suggested repeatedly that he was excited to open the season in a Canadian market, to play against Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl and to skate on a line with Elias Pettersson and Andrei Kuzmenko in the opener. He discussed his routine, his preparation. He handled it like a professional.

That’s the thing about Garland. There are some players who would be bothered by what we learned about his situation on Tuesday and understandably so. Garland just isn’t one of them.

This is a focused player. A player with genuine affection for Canucks head coach Rick Tocchet, who he worked with previously in Arizona.

On Tuesday, Garland faced the music from the media professionally after practice and he’ll conduct himself in the same manner whenever he dresses for the Canucks this season, as his camp — and the team — continue to work to facilitate a trade.

Because in truth, any active desire for a separation between player and club in this instance isn’t being driven solely by Garland. In fact, he’s been made widely available on the trade market in two consecutive summers.

Canucks management, desperate for additional cap flexibility, has been exploring its options on and off to trade Garland — and Brock Boeser, and Tyler Myers — over the course of multiple years. This isn’t a secret within the industry, and it’s been widely reported by multiple credible sources in the past (including The Athletic).

There is mutual interest in facilitating a deal here, which actually scratches at an area where Canucks fans and personnel should be a bit more concerned on the eve of the club’s home opener. The team’s desperate need for additional cap flexibility is a legitimate concern.

At Tuesday’s practice, as the Garland news captured the headlines, the team iced a patchwork lineup that featured only five healthy defensemen.

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Big free-agent acquisition Carson Soucy is unlikely to be available to play on Tuesday as a result of a lower-body injury, although his status was upgraded from “week to week” to “day to day” by both Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin and Tocchet. Guillaume Brisebois left the arena an hour prior to the Canucks’ practice as he continues to recuperate from an undisclosed injury.

Up front, meanwhile, Vasily Podkolzin — officially on the team’s active roster for long-term injured reserve (LTI) capture reasons, but on the outside of the roster bubble looking in — wasn’t at practice at all. Teddy Blueger was similarly absent and Tocchet seemed unsure about whether he’d be able to dress in Wednesday’s season opener. Ilya Mikheyev skated as a fill-in but will open the season on injured reserve and won’t play in the opener.

The Canucks, remarkably healthy throughout training camp and the preseason, have hit something of a short-term injury crisis on the eve of the season. On Tuesday the team was one defender and one forward short of a full lineup at its final practice before the season opener.

In the hard-cap NHL, this spate of injuries and the latest reports on Garland are all connected. As dull and demeaning and dry as it is, it’s always about cap space.

None of Soucy, Brisebois, Mikheyev or Blueger appear to be so injured that they can responsibly be placed on LTI, which would cause them to be unavailable to the team until the first week of November. And yet none of them are guaranteed to be available to play on Wednesday either, and in fact, it seems probable that all four players will be unavailable to dress in the club’s first game on Wednesday against the Edmonton Oilers.

This is a headache for a team that’s pressed up against the upper limit of the salary cap as it is, and in fact, is exceeding the upper limit by nearly $2.5 million — an overage facilitated by Tucker Poolman’s presence on LTI. On Wednesday morning, after the first day of cap accounting, Podkolzin can be re-assigned to the American League and the cap space he vacates can be used to recall one player.

That will help, but if Vancouver needs both an additional forward and a defenseman for Wednesday’s game, which seems likely, it may have to play its first game of the season short a player and then enter emergency conditions.

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Emergency conditions for a recall are established when a team falls short of 12 healthy forwards, six healthy defenders or two healthy goaltenders. The emergency recall rules permit a team in emergency conditions to call up a replacement player, provided that the replacement’s cap figure falls below a certain threshold.

Utilizing emergency conditions to fill out a roster isn’t uncommon, but it’s unusual — although not unheard of, the Ottawa Senators find themselves in the same boat — to require it on the second day of the regular season for a club’s home opener.

This is the tightrope, however, that the Canucks are going to be walking all season. It’s a predictable outcome given the way the club has constructed this roster and allocated their cap dollars. It’s one thing for a contender to be dealing with these kinds of cap challenges, it’s another for a team that enters the season with flimsier aspirations.

Because no matter how expertly the team manages their roster day-to-day, factors outside a team’s control — a flu bug running through the team on the eve of the season, a sudden spate of injuries to a variety of depth players all at once — will ultimately govern how crunchy a team’s in-season cap management decisions become.

Is it any wonder, then, that the Canucks might welcome whatever cap breathing room would result from a potential Garland trade?

That breathing room, by the way, would very likely be partial. Multiple reports — from both TSN’s Chris Johnston and Friedman in his latest 32 Thoughts column — have suggested the Canucks would be open to retaining some of Garland’s salary in a trade to help facilitate a deal. That’s not just the rub, that’s a prerequisite.

The notion of retaining money mirrors what played out with Boeser, whose agent Ben Hankinson of Octagon Sports Management was similarly granted permission to discuss a potential Boeser trade with teams last season. Those efforts similarly leaked out into the public’s consciousness.

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There may have been a market for Boeser at $4 million per season, but at the full freight of his $6.65 million cap hit, there wasn’t. Boeser’s situation played out at such great length that his trade request was rescinded following the season and he remains a Canucks player.

The path Garland is on now will most likely unfold at a similar snail’s pace. You never say never in this business, but it’s hard to imagine that there’s enough aggregate cap space in the system for a straightforward Garland deal to come together quickly in season.

Like the complex decisions the club will face in filling out its roster on Wednesday and the cap-induced limitations Tocchet will cope with when filling out his lineup card, the Garland situation is the product of an accumulation of decisions that have left the Canucks deeply inflexible cap-wise at the very outset of the campaign. The choices won’t get any less complicated from here on out, particularly as the club is set to head out on a five-game road trip through locales as far-flung as Florida and Tennessee following their home opener.

So don’t sweat the distraction. Garland is a pro with a high motor, and he’ll perform like a pro with a high motor as this situation plays out, quite possibly in slow motion.

The logic underpinning it, however, the slim margin for error that the club is working through — both on the ice and off of it — at the very outset of the season, that’s the real concern worth monitoring.

(Photo of Conor Garland celebrating after scoring a goal: Steven Bisig / USA Today)