Canucks' Trades: Smart Long-Term Move or Costly Mistake?

Special for PuckPedia by Steve Werier, former Florida Panthers Assistant General Manager

In the days leading up to the 2021 expansion draft, Kyle Dubas faced a dilemma.

The Toronto GM wanted to prevent Seattle from selecting both Justin Holl and Alex Kerfoot, but he only had one protection spot left.

So he made a trade.

Dubas sent a late-round pick to Jim Rutherford’s Pittsburgh Penguins in exchange for a player he hoped would catch Seattle’s eye and be claimed by the Kraken, sparing both Holl and Kerfoot.

And it worked! This is exactly what happened.

Told this way, it sounds like Toronto’s moves paid off. A late-round pick is a reasonable price for a GM to protect valued roster players (whoever they may be).

But here’s the thing. 

This telling of the story skips over the identity of the asset Toronto acquired from Pittsburgh for a hot minute before it moved on to Seattle. 

It was Jared McCann. 

As Elaine Benes would say, we “yada-yada’d the bisque”.

Because Jared McCann was a mid-twenties, cost-controlled, versatile two-way player who would soon become Seattle’s 40-goal-scoring first line center. 

In other words, McCann was way more valuable than both Holl and Kerfoot! 

If Toronto had hit pause after the trade with Pittsburgh and re-evaluated its expansion priorities- without taking into account that McCann was found money - they might have made a better strategic decision.

Instead, they acquired something valuable and then quickly gave it away. In this light, the same series of transactions reflects far differently on their management group. 

This brings us to the Vancouver Canucks and the J.T. Miller trades.

Years ago, when he was still blogging, now-Carolina AGM Tyler Dellow wrote this about trading of a star player (I think I have the name right here): “The hard thing about a Taylor Hall trade is that you don’t have Taylor Hall on your team anymore”.  I think that’s a good mental model, and it applies here.  The problem – usually - with trading a 100-point, power forward center like J.T. Miller is that you no longer have J.T. Miller on your team. And that’s really hard to make up for in a trade, including this one where Miller was inarguably the best player in the deal.

Of course, it was more complicated than that. There were things happening in Vancouver related to Miller, and those things were being handled – or mishandled – by Canucks management. That mismanagement was causing what, by all accounts, were significant adverse consequences for the team’s other star center, Elias Pettersson. There were no signs of improvement - the team President’s recent public statements suggested it was only going to get worse. In this light, it made some sense for Vancouver to trade Miller, which would have been unfathomable immediately following his 2023-24 campaign.

I think Vancouver did fine in the first trade with New York under these largely self-inflicted difficult circumstances. If we work backward from 2030, the final year of Miller’s contract, the Canucks come out ahead. The Rangers are now the ones the hook for age 35-37 J.T. Miller at an $8 million AAV, and I’d rather be on the other side of that trade given his mileage and rugged playing style. Conversely, the Canucks have a much shorter 2.5-year commitment to Filip Chytil (more on him soon), after which they’ll have Miller’s entire $8M cap hit freed up to use as they please over the remaining years.

Freeing up cap space is good! It’s a big win if you know how to use it! The problem is that this Canucks management group hasn’t shown they’re particularly capable of doing so. That’s why they had to package bad contracts they signed just last year (Heinen, Desharnais) as part of the second trade with Pittsburgh later last night.  That’s also why they had to do something similar last season with a large, bad contract they signed earlier (Mikheyev). And they still have a few of these suboptimal deals left on the books (Soucy, etc). If you keep negotiating contracts that work out like new car purchases, where their value plummets the moment you drive them off the lot, that isn’t good.  To build a contender, a team needs to sign contracts where the surplus value of at least a few star players relative to their cap hits is substantial. Vancouver has just one player who clearly fits this bill: Quinn Hughes, and that’s not for long. 

Let’s move on to Filip Chytil. Chytil has an injury history, that’s well documented, but it doesn’t mean any of us without access to his medical records have enough information to form an educated opinion. He’s only signed for two more seasons, so the risk to Vancouver is term-limited. Realistically, he may very well have been the best young center offered to the Canucks for Miller now. At his best, he’s fast, gets to the net, and has put together at least one very good full season and playoff campaign in the not too distant past (2022).  In the absence of both Miller and Bo Horvat, Vancouver needs more skilled centers (reports suggest they’re shopping for another one as we speak).  Whether Chytil is more valuable than his $4.5M cap hit is another discussion, but again, this is a two-way door type of bet that the Canucks can move on from if it goes south.  It’s totally fine.

There’s an argument that the best prospect changing hands wasn’t Victor Mancini, who New York included in the Miller trade, it was Melvin Fernstrom, who Vancouver shipped to Pittsburgh. Fernstrom is an 18-year-old playing and scoring goals in Sweden’s top pro league, the SHL. While his stat line (3-5-8) might appear modest, the real signal here is that he’s good enough to be competing against grown men at such a young age. That typically means he’s pretty good.

The Canucks including Fernstrom in the deal with the Pens raises some potential organizational red flags.  A few months ago, Vancouver selected Fernstrom with their first pick in the 2024 Draft (3rd round, pick #93).  Their amateur scouts wouldn’t have used that first at bat casually –they likely valued him highly. From my own experience, the player you select around there is typically one you internally ranked around 45-55 overall; there’s a lot of team by team variance across draft boards after the first round. At this stage, Fernstrom is still a lottery ticket, but he’s more like a $20 scratch-off than the $1 variety.  Vancouver should be stockpiling assets like this, not shipping them out as unnecessary throw-ins to help jettison bad contracts in a deal where they’re the ones already shipping out a potentially unprotected 2026 1st.  I don’t like it, and if I was a Canucks amateur scout, I would have been banging my head pretty hard when I saw both Fernstrom and the NYR 1st included in that second deal.

At 22, Mancini is a little further along his development curve than Fernstrom. He’s big and, by all accounts, skates well, but scouts and analysts I respect view his NHL upside as a third pairing defenseman. That could be wrong – every team needs more useful depth defensemen - but players of his value can typically be found every summer on the UFA market for $2 million.  That still makes him a nice add-on in a deal that was already alright for Vancouver, who will hope he turns out similarly to how another big fast Hartford player, Morgan Barron, did for the Jets when they persuaded NYR to include him as part of the Andrew Copp trade.

Now, let’s get to the most valuable asset Vancouver received for Miller; the first round pick which has the potential to be special. If it slides to 2026 (which as of right now is not far off from being an even money bet given where NYR is in the standings and the top-13 protections that apply to it), it becomes unprotected, which could have franchise-altering implications. I don’t think that’s a crazy leap either given the age of much of the Rangers’ roster.  Vancouver could have kept that pick and hate-watched the Rangers for the next two-years. They also could have waited and shopped it around the draft, when there’s typically league-wide interest in assets like that.  Instead, they packaged it with two bad contracts and a prospect to Pittsburgh in exchange for two expiring contracts.  I don’t love that.

I’m always a little skeptical when a manager trades with his old club for one of his old players. It doesn’t always mean they’re overvaluing familiarity, but it doesn’t always mean they aren’t.  Hearing the Canucks President immediately wax poetic about how well he made out seven years ago, the last time he traded for Marcus Pettersson – something that should be completely irrelevant to the 2025 calculus – suggests familiarity was a not insignificant factor here. And I do think the Canucks paid far too much for Pettersson given (i) he’s a pending UFA and (ii) Vancouver, sans Miller, doesn’t appear to be a contender this year. For instance, I wonder what it would have cost them to acquire a similar, pending UFA puck moving defenseman in San Jose’s Jake Walman.  I doubt it would have cost a potentially unprotected 1st. 

On the other hand, the Canucks crew do know ‘Marcus Pettersson the person’ very well, and that matters a lot more right now. It’s helpful that they’re bringing in a, by-all-accounts, great in the room player into the fold in light of the recent organizational turmoil. And it’s also probably not a total coincidence that he’s a countryman of Vancouver’s franchise forward who could probably benefit from another familiar face right now. From that angle, I think it was a good piece of business to try to add Pettersson now (rather than waiting for the summer), albeit a costly one. And I think it’s reasonable to have some apprehension about whether the sunk cost of acquiring Pettersson will lead the Canucks to overpay to extend him to avoid the perception that they wasted the pick.

We’ve done a pretty deep dive from the Canucks side of things, so let’s end off with a quick take on the other two clubs.

Overall, I love the trade for Pittsburgh. They’re firmly in rebuilding mode and a contingent right to an unprotected 1st round pick perfectly aligns with their greatest needs.  They maximized Pettersson’s asset value while picking up a potentially valuable prospect along the way, and the two bad Vancouver contracts won’t hurt them in any way.  We started this review off with a Kyle Dubas duck hook, but this deal was an ace. 

The Rangers brought back a familiar face that should be welcomed in their room and on Broadway. Miller was great there before, and if he returns to last year’s form, he should be the catalyst that leads them back to the playoffs. He would be a huge asset for them for at least the next 3 or so seasons. If he slows down towards the end of his contract, the worst case scenario is he ends up being a $2.5M or so cap hit following a buyout, which is surmountable in a rising cap environment. There’s a risk that the team doesn’t turn things around, they fall towards the bottom of the standings, and the pick they shipped off becomes far more valuable, but the odds of that happening are lower than they were before they added J.T. Miller.

Steve Werier joined the Florida Panthers in 2014 and was Assistant General Manager from 2016 to 2017. He's currently the general counsel to a New York based tech venture company.