Before the season started, who would have guessed that Quinn Hughes would be on the Minnesota Wild by Christmas?
Friday’s blockbuster trade that sent Hughes to Minnesota in exchange for Zeev Buium, Marco Rossi, Liam Öhgren, and a 2026 first-round pick will be dissected for years to come. The effects of this move are going to be felt league-wide, with winners and losers on both sides of the ledger, as one of the game’s best players joins one of the league’s hottest teams.
Let’s dive in.
Winner: Quinn Hughes
Before the Canucks pulled the trigger on this trade, Jim Rutherford presented Hughes with the possible move to the Wild. Hughes, who didn’t have any formal trade protection on his contract, took time to consider Minnesota as a destination and ultimately gave the Canucks the green light.
The best-case scenario for Hughes may have been a trade to New Jersey to play with his brothers, but moving to any contending team has to be an exciting opportunity for him. Hughes is obsessed with winning, and you could tell how frustrated he was with the hopeless situation of the 32nd-place Canucks, who are poised to miss the playoffs for the fifth time in six years. NHL players’ primes aren’t very long — Vancouver could have easily dragged this situation out until the summer, which would have meant another wasted season for Hughes. A delayed trade would have meant months of additional uncertainty and his future being a 24/7 talking point.
Instead, Hughes avoids all that nonsense and joins a team that is tied for the sixth-best points percentage in the NHL. He’s all but guaranteed just the third playoff appearance of his career. In Vancouver, Hughes was expected to do all the heavy lifting to manufacture offense by himself. In Minnesota, he’ll be surrounded by elite offensive weapons to pass to in Kirill Kaprizov and Matt Boldy.
When Hughes becomes extension-eligible in the summer, he’ll have the leverage to command whatever price he wants from the Wild, who you’d assume will move heaven and earth to extend him after the haul they gave up to acquire him. And if Hughes doesn’t want to stay in Minnesota for whatever reason? He can still call the shots and become a free agent in 2027.
Loser: Canucks ownership and management
Yes, Vancouver made the most of an unfortunate situation by extracting a boatload of assets (more on that in a bit) from Minnesota. Make no mistake, though, this is an awful, heartbreaking moment for the organization and its fan base.
Hughes was one of the best players to ever wear a Canucks uniform and was by far the greatest defenseman in franchise history. The Canucks catastrophically failed to build a sustainable contender around him. Going back to the Jim Benning era, the Canucks refused to accumulate draft picks and young assets to build around Hughes, instead constantly chasing short-term fixes. Rutherford’s regime inherited a messy cap situation and a barren prospect pool, but didn’t fare much better outside of the fleeting 2023-24 season, where the Canucks made the second round of the playoffs.
Fans will remember both of those management groups and ownership (they reportedly refused a proper rebuild in the late 2010s and allowed Benning to be general manager for way too long) for wasting some of Hughes’ best years and ultimately losing him.
Winner: Minnesota Wild
The Wild have suffered a whopping seven first-round playoff defeats in the last decade. They haven’t made the Western Conference Final since 2003 and have never appeared in a Stanley Cup Final. Adding Hughes, a top-10 player in the NHL, is the kind of game-changing acquisition that could finally help them go on a deep playoff run. On paper, a team led by Kaprizov, Hughes, Boldy, Brock Faber, Jesper Wallstedt, and Joel Eriksson Ek profiles as a true Stanley Cup contender.
As colleague Dom Luszczyszyn pointed out, only three teams had fewer points from their blue line than Minnesota’s 50 going into Thursday’s games. The Wild, before Hughes’ acquisition, were also the only team without a single defenseman projected to have an above-average Offensive Rating, according to Dom’s model.
Is there risk to this trade if Hughes doesn’t re-sign? Sure. But Minnesota’s chances of extending Hughes are aided by the fact that they can offer him more money than anybody else this offseason — the Wild can offer him an eight-year extension, a frontloaded structure, and extremely player-friendly signing bonuses according to the old CBA rules through Sept. 15, 2026, compared to the maximum of six years if he signs with a new team as an unrestricted free-agent on July 1, 2027.
In a worst-case scenario where the Wild can’t re-sign Hughes, they can trade him elsewhere and recoup a ton of value. Brock Nelson, for example, fetched the Islanders a first-round pick, an A-grade prospect in Calum Ritchie, and a third-round pick at last year’s trade deadline as a rental. If Hughes were dealt at the 2027 trade deadline as a rental, he could be worth two first-round picks and a prospect.
Meanwhile, the upside for this trade is off the charts if the Wild can extend Hughes for the remainder of his prime, especially in a world where elite talent is nearly impossible to acquire.
Winner: Canucks’ under-25 talent pool
It’s an absolute nightmare that the Canucks lost Hughes. But if you accept that his departure was inevitable given the team’s state, the organization salvaged the trade return reasonably well. When The Athletic surveyed executives from different NHL teams, most gave the Canucks high marks for landing this lucrative package of young assets.
Buium is the piece that Canucks fans should be salivating about. The 20-year-old left-shot defender was one of the best players in college hockey the last couple of years. He’s an elite skater, is already a capable PP1 quarterback, and has the ceiling to one day become Hughes-lite. Scott Wheeler rated him as the fifth-best prospect in hockey last summer. Buium has faced some defensive challenges as a rookie this season, but he only turned 20 last week. Whether Buium reaches his potential will make or break this trade return for the Canucks.
Rossi is a quality second-line center coming off a 60-point season. He’s more of a complementary scorer rather than someone you’d count on to drive a line. It will be interesting to see how he produces away from Kaprizov, especially since the Canucks don’t have a star winger to play with him.
Öhgren, the No. 19 pick in 2022, is a decent left-wing prospect. His stock has dipped as he’s yet to register a point in 18 NHL games this season, but there’s still a realistic scenario where he could pan out as a quality third-line forward.
Add whoever the Canucks select with Minnesota’s first-round pick at this summer’s draft, and all of a sudden, Vancouver’s under-25 talent pool is in significantly better shape. The Canucks will need lottery picks for 2-3 years to add elite, top-of-the-lineup difference makers, but this trade at least ensures that the club is entering a rebuild/retool with some blue-chip young assets.
Loser: New Jersey Devils
The Devils could end up having the last laugh if Hughes shuns the Wild and bolts to play with his brothers as a free agent in 2027.
There’s no guarantee that scenario will unfold, though. So for now, it has to be disappointing for New Jersey to strike out on Hughes.
New Jersey’s inability to complete a Hughes trade shouldn’t come as a surprise — we wrote last week about why Hughes’ lack of trade protection gave the Canucks significant leverage and how the Devils didn’t have the assets to land him. Pierre LeBrun reported that the Devils “made what they feel was a strong first offer” for Hughes.
It makes complete sense that the Devils bowed out in the end (and that’s not a criticism), but boy, could they have used Hughes to help a team that has lost six of its last seven games and is currently sitting outside of a playoff spot following Jack Hughes’ injury.
The biggest fear, though? The Wild achieve playoff success with Hughes this season and secure his signature on a long-term extension this summer by offering him the extra term, extra guaranteed dollars, front-loaded contract structure, and lucrative signing bonuses on a deal he can’t get anywhere else.
Winner: Vancouver’s chances of tanking for a top-3 pick
One advantage of the Canucks selling Hughes early, rather than dragging this out until the offseason, is that they have a much better chance of tanking for a top-three draft pick. In some past years, the Canucks have infamously gone on meaningless second-half hot streaks that have worsened their draft position. That scenario is technically still possible, but it feels far less likely when you remove a superstar player from a team that’s already in 32nd place.
Sure, Rossi’s arrival will be a major boost to the Canucks’ dire center situation (David Kämpf has been playing in a top-six center role) and Buium is NHL-ready as well. Still, neither’s impact this year will come close to matching Hughes’ play-driving dominance.
Landing as high a pick as possible this summer is a must for a Canucks team that desperately needs to be restocked with future star talent. While Gavin McKenna at No. 1 would be the dream, other elite prospects in the top three to four would have Vancouver fans drooling.
Loser: The rest of the Central division
Nearly every Central team will be negatively impacted by Minnesota’s acquisition of Hughes.
If the playoffs began today, the Stars would face the Wild in Round 1. Before this trade, Dallas would have been the heavy favorite, but acquiring Hughes (and Wallstedt’s breakout this year) undoubtedly closes the gap between the two teams.
Is the Winnipeg Jets’ Cup contention window closed? The Jets are already in danger of missing the playoffs, but even if they qualify, how can they realistically get through Colorado, Dallas, and Minnesota, both now and in the future?
The Blackhawks and Mammoth, two up-and-coming teams, face a more challenging ascent as the Wild level up.
St. Louis, which was viewed in a similar vein to Minnesota before the season started, now seems miles behind the latter.
Winner: Judd Brackett
In 2020, following disagreements on autonomy and a breakdown of trust with then-Canucks GM Benning, Brackett left Vancouver to take over as the Wild’s director of amateur scouting.
Since then, Minnesota has built up one of the best prospect pipelines in the NHL. And as many people pointed out in the aftermath of the Hughes trade, it was the inclusion of three of Brackett’s first-round draft picks in Rossi, Buium, and Öhgren that got the deal across the finish line. That has to be a massive feather in Brackett’s cap.
The jury is still out on exactly how good those players will become, but their appeal to the Canucks as blue-chip assets is all that matters for the Wild. The Devils, in comparison, drafted Alex Holtz two picks ahead of Rossi in 2020 and Anton Silayev two picks ahead of Buium. Silayev could still turn out to be a good selection, but there’s an alternate universe where New Jersey could have had the exact assets Vancouver coveted in a Hughes deal had it made different picks.
Winner: Brock Faber
Brock Faber is a bona fide top-pair talent, but at times, he’s been asked to do too much as the team’s No. 1 defender. When the Wild ran into top-four blue line injuries in past years, Faber would routinely be pushing 26-30 minutes per night. That excessive workload would eventually catch up to him and cause a dip in his play and two-way metrics.
Now, Faber can slot in as an elite No. 2 defenseman rather than as a No. 1. Hughes’ arrival as another massive minute muncher will take some stress off of Faber, whose performance should hit another level now that he’s slotted more appropriately.
Faber could also end up being Hughes’ full-time partner, which would be a remarkable opportunity. It would allow the 23-year-old right-shot defender to fully focus on his strengths as an excellent defensive stopper and enable him to defer most offensive creation to Hughes.
Loser: Hughes’ American friends on the Canucks
Last summer, Brock Boeser, Conor Garland, and Thatcher Demko all signed contract extensions to stay in Vancouver. Back then, it seemed like a promising sign that the club’s secondary core pieces, who were not only Hughes’ fellow countrymen but also friends, were willing to commit to the organization long-term.
How are those players feeling now? It must be gutting to lose your best player, a close friend, and with that, any chance of being a playoff team.
Boeser, the team’s longest tenured player, has planted roots in Vancouver. He has a no-movement clause and seems like the kind of loyal player that would want to stay for the long haul. What about Garland and Demko, though? Neither has any trade protection because their contract extensions don’t kick in until next season. Will the Canucks shop those two as the rebuild/retool continues?
Winner: The Eastern Conference
Hughes’ initial preference was to be traded somewhere East. It’s perhaps why teams like the Red Wings, Devils, Capitals, and Flyers dominated some of the early Hughes trade rumors. While those teams may be disappointed to miss out on Hughes, many are at least catching a break by not having him join a rival within the conference.
The Hurricanes, for example, are probably pleased that Hughes stayed in the West rather than joining the Capitals, who they will likely have to play in Round 1 or 2 because of the divisional playoff format. The Caps probably feel the same way about the Hurricanes not landing Hughes.
Detroit made a lot of sense as a possible landing spot for Hughes, given his ties to the Michigan area and the Red Wings’ surplus of young assets. Detroit’s Atlantic Division playoff competitors, such as the Canadiens, Bruins, Leafs, and others, must be glad Hughes isn’t landing in their division and hurting their playoff chances.
