The Athletic has live coverage of the 2025 NHL trade deadline.
The Vancouver Canucks are better than the team we saw skid to a 1-4-0 performance on their recent Western Conference road swing. Hockey operations leadership knows it, the coaching staff knows it and Canucks players know it, too.
What’s most relevant at this time of year, however, is how Jim Rutherford and Patrik Allvin will react to their team’s recent dip in form ahead of the NHL trade deadline.
The organization intended to give Canucks players an opportunity to cement their status as a playoff team in the wake of the transformative J.T. Miller trade, and did just that, but that opportunity has now been largely squandered.
With the trade deadline less than 72 hours away, Vancouver finds itself locked into a crowded, tooth-and-nail fight to make the playoffs. And if the Canucks make it, their first-round opponent will be one of the NHL’s best teams.
Regardless of what business the club opts to conduct ahead of the trade deadline, the Canucks will enter the stretch run hobbled in net, with Thatcher Demko’s status uncertain due to injury, on the back end, with Quinn Hughes’ status uncertain due to injury, and with their most gifted forward struggling enormously to find his game.
Canucks decision-makers still believe this team has the capacity and talent level required to qualify for the playoffs, and that matters to the organization.
If their goaltending is right, could the Canucks get hot and make noise in the postseason? That’s a key question and a major consideration that will shape Vancouver’s approach to the deadline.
Now, you’ve always got a chance if you qualify for the playoffs, but given what this club has shown us recently, the idea that “anything can happen,” seems like an especially thin bet this season.
The indication from league sources is that Canucks decision-makers have come to terms with that reality. That internal awareness has been accelerated by the injury factors the club is navigating with respect to Demko and Hughes.
This will always be an organization that prioritizes winning and short-term success, for better and for worse. The Canucks want to make the playoffs and take their best shot, make no mistake.
They’re also a team that appears to be prepared to move pending unrestricted free agents while working the phones and exploring their options to buy.
Here’s what I’m hearing in the lead-up to the trade deadline.
The Canucks’ posture and the own rental thing
While all it takes is one phone call to change this, the Canucks aren’t especially close to jump-starting the market with a major trade. Nor have they made material progress in contract talks with pending unrestricted free agents Brock Boeser, Pius Suter and Derek Forbort.
With under 72 hours to go before the trade deadline passes, the Canucks are positioning themselves as both a buyer and a seller.
They appear to be motivated to execute something of a hybrid approach at the deadline, an approach dictated by the transitional team building stage they entered fitfully as a result of the Miller trade, and their perch in the NHL standings as a credible playoff striver.
As a seller, the club is open to moving its pending unrestricted free agents — provided the returns are sufficiently enticing. The Canucks are unlikely, however, to deal any major contributors off their roster with term remaining on their deal. And, yes, that includes struggling centre Elias Pettersson. Carson Soucy could be the only realistic exception to this.
As a buyer, the club is exclusively showing interest in younger players, ideally in the mid-20s age range, that have term remaining on their deal.
The Canucks don’t appear to be in the rental market as buyers, and don’t seem to be aggressively targeting pending unrestricted free agents with the idea of acquiring players for the purpose of extending them — as the club did with Marcus Pettersson and Drew O’Connor over the past month.
While there’s a chance the Canucks will keep some of their pending unrestricted free agents around beyond the deadline, any “own rental” decisions would be motivated more by the market prices buyers are willing to pay, as opposed to being influenced by the club’s assessment and weighing of short-term priorities.
The Canucks are actively exploring their options as a seller. If buyers are willing to meet their price for one of their expiring players, the club will very strongly consider it. Given the opportunity to qualify for the postseason that’s very much still ahead of them, however, the Canucks aren’t just going to take the best offer available for their pending unrestricted free agents.
If Vancouver does sell in this manner, it’ll do so with an eye toward utilizing any assets gained from rental sales to acquire younger players that the club considers a long-term fit.
The “lukewarm” Brock Boeser market
Extension talks with Boeser have been at a stalemate for months and there’s no progress as the deadline approaches.
With the clock ticking toward noon PT on Friday, there remains a material disagreement between the two sides on price. The Canucks rate Boeser as a person and a player, and are clear-eyed about the difficulty they’ll face in attempting to replace his goal scoring production in their lineup in the event, which a team source described as better than even odds at this point, that Boeser departs in a trade or as a free agent this summer.
Boeser, meanwhile, is settled and content in Vancouver and would prefer to stay all things being equal.
The two sides, however, have been unable to find common ground on the valuation of Boeser’s next contract. Boeser, a 40-goal scorer last season and one of the NHL’s top 50 goal scorers across the last five years, is looking for a square deal with the sort of term and security befitting his production. The Canucks, however, are leery about such a valuation to this point.
As a result, Boeser’s name is out there on the trade market ahead of the deadline, but the demand for his services has been characterized as “lukewarm” by one league source. And the Canucks aren’t going to be willing to sell a key offensive cog like Boeser at below what they see as his market value, especially not when they’re in the thick of a playoff chase.
The dynamic of the trade market for wingers is a fascinating leaguewide story to observe and could shape how the Canucks proceed with Boeser this week.
At the moment, there are two key dominoes that the Canucks — and the rest of the NHL — are watching closely on the winger market.
The first domino is Mikko Rantanen. Acquired by the Carolina Hurricanes in a blockbuster trade for Martin Necas several weeks ago, the Hurricanes are reportedly attempting to sign Rantanen to a long-term contract ahead of the trade deadline.
The Hurricanes haven’t been shy about rolling the dice with expiring free agents in the past, but how those conversations proceed, and what the Hurricanes decide to do in the event that Rantanen declines to sign a long-term extension this week, is being closely monitored by contending teams in the market for help on the wings.
The second domino appears to be Pittsburgh Penguins winger Rickard Rakell. Rakell, 31, has 52 points in 62 games this season, he drives play reliably at five-on-five and has four years remaining on his contract, which carries a $5 million annual average value. Rakell comes attached to some long-term risk given the term on his deal and his age, but he’s performed at an exceptionally high level this season.
If Rakell is ultimately moved by the Penguins, and they reportedly don’t feel any particular urgency to make that move now, then that will impact the wing options available, and as a result, the Boeser market.
This is a tricky one to handicap. For now, the Canucks don’t seem to be finding traction in contract talks with Boeser’s camp, nor are they fielding the sort of offers that would entice them to sell Boeser when they still have an opportunity to make the playoffs.
Pius Suter brings significant utility to an NHL team’s middle-six. (Codie McLachlan / Getty Images)
Pius Suter and Derek Forbort
The Boeser situation is the big one for the Canucks, but Suter and Forbort are worth touching on here too.
In some ways, they’re in a similar boat to Boeser, in that the Canucks will consider trading them ahead of the deadline if teams are willing to meet Vancouver’s asking price.
The Canucks are fond of both players. They see Suter as a versatile middle-six player that a team can win with and Forbort as a professional shutdown defender capable of giving a team sturdy, defensive minutes for 55 games or so per season.
Suter, however, has earned himself a raise and could easily double his salary on his next contract; I’m not convinced Vancouver would be prepared to extend him at that level. Forbort’s next contract is more likely to look similar to his current deal, and that’s something the Canucks would probably be open to, although they’re not actively engaged in attempting to lock that in this week before the trade deadline passes.
Currently, Vancouver seems comfortable with keeping both players on the roster and in the lineup, and believes that it would have a decent chance of retaining both players if it continued contract talks on the other side of the deadline.
One thing to note is that since Rutherford and Allvin took over in Vancouver, the club has somewhat rarely been very busy on deadline day itself — aside from minor trades involving players like Tyler Motte.
The Canucks have usually been proactive in conducting their business beforehand.
Don’t take past behaviour as an indicator of what to expect this week, necessarily. Vancouver hasn’t often been a seller like this during the Rutherford era, and especially with depth contributors like Forbort and Suter, these are the sort of acquisitions that are more like finishing deals for contending teams. So these situations could take a bit of time to unwind as the week unfolds, and could even wait until the eleventh hour to be consummated (or not).
If the price is right between now and Friday, Suter and Forbort are players who could absolutely move as the club looks to accumulate assets and add younger players. More than anything, the Canucks’ decision on Suter and Forbort, as it will with a higher stakes situation like Boeser’s, will fundamentally come down to the prices on offer.
Odds and ends
The Canucks are genuinely excited about the state of their defence group, both over the balance of this season and going forward, buoyed by the emergence of blueliner Elias Pettersson, the acquisition of Victor Mancini and the anticipated arrival of a pair of prospects in Tom Willander and Sawyer Mynio.
The club’s preoccupation, however, is goal scoring and speed at centre.
Losing Miller — both as a goal scorer and as a setup man — has blown a major hole in Vancouver’s attack, and in its centre depth.
If the club compounds the loss of Miller’s offensive value by also losing Boeser, whether that happens this week or this summer, then the need for Canucks management to pull a rabbit out of a hat in grafting high-end attacking juice into the lineup will become even more urgent.
The club is hopeful that 2022 first-round pick Jonathan Lekkerimäki can provide a partial answer to the need for more goal scoring talent. Lekkerimäki was called up on Tuesday, practised in a top-six role and will be given every opportunity to stick around at the NHL level over the balance of this season. His performance will dictate whether he returns to the AHL or gets an extended NHL look, but the Canucks hope he’ll find traction and stick around for the stretch run.
While the Canucks are cautiously optimistic about Lekkerimäki, who has lit up the AHL in his first professional campaign in North America, being an offensive difference-maker in Vancouver — both down the stretch this season, and next year — the club will be patient with the gifted young goal scorer. Specifically, he’s not going to be viewed internally as a potential Boeser replacement.
The club wants to put Lekkerimäki in a role in which he can succeed, ideally as a middle-six offensive sparkplug, which will allow him to figure out how to succeed at the NHL level as his minutes and role scale up over time.
(Photo of Brock Boeser and Elias Pettersson: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
