What is the Canucks’ plan going forward?
The biggest question of the Vancouver Canucks‘ season was answered Friday, as they agreed to trade star defenseman Quinn Hughes to the Minnesota Wild for center Marco Rossi, defenseman Zeev Buium, winger Liam Ohgren, and a 2026 first-round pick. Just because that size-43 shoe finally dropped, though, doesn’t mean the Canucks don’t have other questions to address.
Is Vancouver, currently dead last in the NHL, content to tank the rest of the season to secure a premium draft pick? Is the Hughes trade just the start of an everything-must-go fire sale? Or are the Canucks hoping to salvage this season with some injured players coming back and the immediate contributions of Rossi and Buium?
On Monday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, Tyler Yaremchuk and former NHL goaltender Carter Hutton discussed the Canucks’ best path forward now that the dust has settled on the Hughes trade.
Tyler Yaremchuk: To me, the biggest positive that can come out of this Canucks season is that they stay exactly where they are. If you come dead last, which is where they currently sit, you guarantee yourself a top-three pick in the NHL Draft. Look around the NHL right now. Look at what Macklin Celebrini is doing. Look at what Connor Bedard is doing. Maybe this doesn’t need to be, and I know this word gets thrown around a lot in Vancouver, a full-scale “rebuild”, but in two years you could get a couple of good young picks.
(Elias) Pettersson is 27, you need him to find some level of his game, and he’s never going to be an $11.6 million player, but if you draft your next face of the franchise in the top three over the next two years, that eases some of the pressure on a guy like Pettersson. When he’s 29 years old, you can still be contending. Brock Boeser, signed long-term, he’s 28 years old. Two years from now I don’t think that’s a guy that’s just going to fall off a cliff. Now you look at a blueline where you have a piece in Zeev Buium that you can build around. You still have Thatcher Demko and Kevin Lankinen signed long-term. I don’t think this team is going to get back into the playoffs next season. I don’t think it’s far-fetched that two to three years from now we view them in the same lens we view some of these other teams if they get some draft lottery luck.
You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode here…