The Vancouver Canucks’ moves ahead of the NHL trade deadline were necessary but insufficient.
When we reflect on what the Canucks accomplished at the trade deadline, and the series of in-season moves that the team has orchestrated since trading Quinn Hughes in mid-December, it all feels very much half-baked. Clearly, this is just the beginning.
This isn’t a mature process yet. Nor is it an especially focused or aggressive one.
Over the past three months, the club has plainly shifted rapidly from retooling in a bit of a hybrid state, to listening but not proactively selling veterans with term, to aggressively looking to move its veteran players (except for the most valuable of those veteran players).
Between selling off Kiefer Sherwood, Tyler Myers, Conor Garland, David Kämpf and Lukas Reichel exclusively for draft picks, without a clear NHL-level player coming back in return, the club accomplished a fair bit ahead of the deadline. The Canucks have begun to build up a surplus of draft capital and shed some cap long-term liabilities.
All of that represents a decent start, with an emphasis on the word “start.”
For all of the basic common-sense business that Vancouver transacted ahead of the deadline, the moves still ultimately lacked some level of ambition and imagination. Make no mistake, both will be required to a far greater degree if the Canucks are going to emerge from the 10-point hole they find themselves in at the bottom of the heap, and claw their way to the top of the NHL pile over the next five years.
Even as Vancouver shed several pending unrestricted free agents and a pair of termed contracts to useful but aging veteran players, the Canucks were still unable to find takers for Teddy Blueger and Evander Kane. Even in the moves Vancouver did execute, the Canucks only seemed to go the extra mile to juice the return of the Myers deal (by agreeing to retain 50 percent of his salary and cap hit). They didn’t find ways to aggressively solve buyers’ problems and speculate in nominally expensive reclamation projects like other rebuilding sides, like the Chicago Blackhawks and Calgary Flames, found ways to do so ahead of the deadline.
This matters. The great NHL efficiency contest is a fundamentally competitive exercise. The goal is to be the best, the most efficient. If you’re trying to build a team capable of winning the Stanley Cup and you’re at the start of a rebuilding process, then the goal is to out-accumulate every other team in the league and to do so by a massive margin using absolutely every lever available to you.
Through that lens, that Vancouver did decently well as a seller, but other teams in similar circumstances did better, isn’t just notable. It’s a failure.
Even if Vancouver hockey fans want to focus on the positives, and fair enough given what they’ve endured this season, it seems critical from my perspective that the organization itself wrap its head around that cruel reality internally.
Because while it’s welcome that the club has at least accepted its current plight and is now willing to sell useful players for raw, uncut futures, successfully rebuilding this team is rather obviously going to require a greater level of aggression, focus and ingenuity. In addition to the sort of sustained commitment to occupying the absolute bottom of the NHL standings, which the Canucks have, to their credit, perfectly demonstrated this season.
Now, with the deadline passed, we turn our attention to the 19 games remaining in this most wicked of Canucks campaigns.
Vancouver’s tragic number — a number calculated by how far away the playoff bar is from the team’s maximum point total — is 22 points. The Canucks are only 11 results from mathematical elimination, an inevitability which should occur at some point in the next two and a half weeks, give or take.
More auspiciously, the Canucks are 10 points back of the 31st-place team, the New York Rangers, who also have a game-in-hand. It would take a bona fide miracle at this juncture for the Canucks to lose out on the top odds at the 2026 NHL Draft Lottery.
That’s doubly true because of how poorly Vancouver has performed since returning from the Olympic break. While the Canucks managed to pick up three of a possible four points in games against the Blackhawks and Winnipeg Jets over the weekend, the extent to which the club relied solely on bounces and finishing luck (at both ends of the ice) in those games was unmistakable.
Since returning from the Olympic break, a stretch of six games, the Canucks have been out-attempted by 121 and outshot by 37. Every single game, even if their opponent is the Blackhawks, the Canucks are besieged by one-way traffic and a barrage of quality scoring chances. Occasionally, the Canucks will find a way to hang around, or even engineer a victory and maybe even a few victories consecutively, but this team is all floor at this point.
Despite a long history of dead cat bounces ruining Vancouver’s draft position, this time out, there’s no reason to sweat. This Canucks team isn’t performing well enough to be any threat whatsoever to move up the NHL standings.
So what even matters for the Canucks down the stretch? There are three key items to watch for, as Vancouver’s slog toward the finish line continues for 19 more games.
Firstly, there’s the key question of whether any of the young talent in Vancouver’s lineup can show consistent flashes, and more importantly, can avoid building up scar tissue that might hold them back long-term during a dispiriting stretch of hockey likely to be punctuated by near-constant losing.
Take the trio of young Canucks defenders in Zeev Buium, Elias Pettersson and Tom Willander. To a man, they’ve struggled enormously over the past month.
All three players are extremely talented, but it’s a big ask to expect young defenders to remain confident and retain that feeling that they belong in this league — and more than that, have the ability to be a difference-maker — when they’re constantly on the back foot, playing higher up the lineup than they would on any other NHL team and getting dunked on in space by the best attacking forwards on the planet night after night.
Can any of them find a way to stem the bleeding? Find a way, even in this grim environment, to start winning shifts and matchups with some level of regularity?
Can Aatu Räty earn a regular spot in the lineup, now that the pressure is off entirely? Can Liam Öhgren continue to look promising, and like a physical, fast player who could potentially even have top-six upside? Can Nikita Tolopilo do enough to make Vancouver seriously consider rostering three goaltenders next season?
Let’s also include Linus Karlsson and Max Sasson here briefly, even though at 26 and 25, respectively, they qualify more as inexperienced veterans.
Despite earning a relatively lucrative extension, Karlsson isn’t being utilized very much at the moment. The skilled, reliable winger played under seven and a half minutes on Friday against Chicago at five-on-five and logged the fourth fewest even-strength minutes among Canucks forwards on Saturday in Winnipeg. Despite this, Karlsson remains Vancouver’s most efficient five-on-five point producer still on the roster, and is posting genuinely excellent underlying numbers no matter how degraded the situation has become around him.
Can Karlsson hack it in a second-line role? Can he complement a skilled centre higher up the lineup? The Canucks have already placed a bet that suggests they think he can; it makes no sense not to give him some rope and a real look in an expanded role down the stretch, especially given his age and lack of further developmental runway.
As for Sasson, no matter what injuries occur, no matter what the rest of the lineup looks like, the Canucks need to commit to giving him this otherwise meaningless run of games to play exclusively on the wing. Sasson’s speed, competitiveness, hockey IQ and solid finishing ability on the counter have given him a narrow path to being an NHL regular, but a run of centre injuries has left him playing almost exclusively in the middle of Vancouver’s forward group this season. The club should try to get him familiar with playing on the wing, because long-term, that’s going to give him his best chance of becoming an everyday calibre NHL player.
Secondly, can any of Vancouver’s more veteran forwards begin to rebuild some measure of trade value?
Almost across the board, just about every Canucks skater has endured a miserable individual campaign. Nils Höglander has battled injuries and struggled to produce; Elias Pettersson still looks completely juiceless; Marcus Pettersson’s defensive acumen is wasted on this roster; Jake DeBrusk has been quiet; and Brock Boeser’s lack of speed has been more noticeable than usual in an environment where he receives no service, because of Vancouver’s lack of quality down the middle.
It’s clear that the level of interest from trade suitors around the NHL was minimal on all of Vancouver’s veterans, even including Garland, given the cut-rate price the Columbus Blue Jackets paid. Nineteen strong games in a wasted season won’t entirely change that narrative, and resuscitating the exchange value of nearly all of these players is likely to be a multiyear organizational project, but a strong finish to the campaign would at least give Vancouver (and these individual skaters) some options going into the offseason.
Finally, as the stretch run unfolds inexorably for the Canucks and their fans, undrafted NCAA free agents will start to become available to be recruited by NHL teams. This variety of free agent is most commonly a relatively low-ceiling prospect with a shorter developmental timeline. If they hit, they often hit immediately.
Vancouver will probably be in tough in free agency, given the state of its lineup and the organization’s rebuilding direction, but the incentives for the top collegiate free agency exist in a totally different universe. Where a veteran typically would prefer an opportunity to chase the Stanley Cup, most college free agents want an opportunity to crack an NHL lineup and earn the sort of playing time that’s required to prove that they’re NHL-level players.
Rebuilding teams have an edge over contenders and teams in a playoff race in recruiting the top undrafted collegiate players, and it’ll be incumbent on Vancouver, which cleared three contract slots last week by trading Myers, Garland, Kämpf and Reichel even after claiming Curtis Douglas off waivers, to make that edge count.
The collegiate free agent class is headlined by a pair of jumbo-sized centres in Tyson Gross and Jack Stockfish, which is convenient given Vancouver’s needs, and there are a number of interesting younger gambles poised to hit free agency after their teams’ seasons are over, like North Dakota defender Jake Livanavage.
Vancouver may not have out-accumulated the likes of Chicago and Calgary at the trade deadline, but there are still levers to pull between now and the end of the season. Finding a way to be successful there, even though the club promoted top recruiter and college scout Scott Young to the NHL coaching staff this season, will be more important down the stretch than any wins and losses could ever be at the tail end of the latest lost Canucks season.
