Braeden Cootes has been returned to the Seattle Thunderbirds of the WHL following just three short games at the NHL level for the Vancouver Canucks.

While there, the 18-year-old did not make an impact on the scoresheet. But did he make an impact on the Canucks’ medium- and long-term roster plans? That could well be the case.

Cootes’ arrival, brief though it was, came way ahead of schedule. No 18-year-old had made the Canucks out of camp since Petr Nedved, and few gave Cootes any real consideration of being the next after being drafted in the middle of the first round at 15^th overall. But Cootes forced his way into the conversation and then onto the opening night roster all the same.

Anytime a player’s development takes such a sudden and unexpected leap forward, it’s only natural to wonder how soon and how big the next steps will be. Right now, Cootes feels like a player with a very open developmental ceiling. And it’s only natural to wonder, in turn, what that all might mean for the franchise’s future.

President of Hockey Ops Jim Rutherford already commented about this, in a sense. In an interview with Canucks Central heading into the regular season, Rutherford allowed that Cootes’ presence on the team had taken some of the “immediate” pressure off the front office to acquire another top-six centre – something that had been the point of intense speculation about for the entire offseason prior.

It makes sense for that to no longer be the case, now that Cootes has been re-assigned. But what about the non-immediate pressure?

Look, one way or another, the Canucks need more offensive pieces than they currently have. No teenager, aside from perhaps Gavin McKenna, was going to change that. Even had Cootes stuck around, the Canucks were going to need to add something at some point.

And that something is probably still a centre. The depth chart right now stands at Elias Pettersson, Filip Chytil, Aatu Räty, the injured Teddy Blueger, and Max Sasson.

Under the right circumstances, that could be enough depth down the middle for a playoff team. But the Canucks haven’t exactly encountered the right circumstances of late. It also takes a far larger leap of imagination to see this as a contending group of centres.

Under most ordinary circumstances, just returning to the playoffs would be a fine goal for a team that missed out last year. But the 2025-26 season is not an ordinary circumstance for this franchise. It is the final season before extension negotiations open up with captain and all-time great Quinn Hughes. Right or wrong, there’s a perception that how the team does this year will help determine Hughes’ willingness to re-sign.

Combine that with the general age of the core, and even the tenure of the front office – whose seat has to be getting a little warmer – and it all adds up to a season in which the Canucks feel they must go for it.

So, with Cootes gone for now, are the Canucks right back on the hunt for a 2C?

Probably.

But Cootes’ arrival should also change their approach to that 2C hunt.

Many of the centres the team looked at this past summer were rightly critiqued as short-term, low-yield options. The Jack Roslovics of the world. The thinking was that such players didn’t really ‘move the needle,’ so to speak, and that the Canucks were better off seeking a more long-term solution.

Now, however, it must be considered that Cootes could be that long-term solution. At 15^th overall, Cootes was already thought to have ‘middle-six’ potential at the very least, and his upward trajectory certainly puts him on pace to wind up as a 2C in the end.

Nothing is guaranteed when it comes to the development of prospects, of course. But there should now be a bit of a balance struck between finding someone for the now, and keeping space available for Cootes in the medium- to long-term.

When that term will arrive for Cootes is difficult to predict. Given what happened this year, it would no longer be unexpected for him to force his way onto the 2026-27 roster, too. He will also have the option of being assigned to the AHL as a 19-year-old.

It feels safest to say that Cootes will be back in the Vancouver lineup full-time by 2027-28 at the latest.

Even then, however, one has to wonder when Cootes will truly be ready to be anointed as permanent fixture in the top-six. Some comparisons have been drawn between Cootes and former Canuck Bo Horvat, and there are definitely some similarities. Horvat, too, showed extremely well in his first training camp, but didn’t crack the roster until the next year as a 19-year-old. And then it took him until Year 3, and age 21, to crack the 50-point threshold.

That was still a fairly accelerated timeline, too. If we imagine that Cootes will fully arrive on a similar schedule, that still leaves the Canucks in need of a centre for a few more seasons.

That covers the immediate future and the medium-term. It’s in the pursuit of a long-term centre solution where we feel that Cootes really makes any difference. The Canucks spent a good chunk of this summer reportedly in pursuit of Marco Rossi, who ultimately extended with the Minnesota Wild. At the time, with Cootes an entirely unknown quantity, the acquisition of Rossi made plenty of sense. But Rossi would have been an expensive acquisition and a long-term investment. We wonder if the Canucks’ would have backed off on the pursuit by now, were Rossi still available. Not that a team can ever have too many good centres, but with an in-house option eventually on the way, perhaps it no longer makes as much sense to put assets into a truly long-view solution.

As a result, we think the answer to the question in the headline is that Cootes has altered, but not stopped, the Canucks’ hunt for a centre. There is still an immediate need for forward help as of this 2025-26 campaign, and as soon as possible. Moving beyond this season, it is unlikely that Cootes can be counted on in the top-six for a few years yet, and so – without any other serious internal options – it also makes sense for any immediate acquisitions to also have some staying power.

If anything, we predict that the Canucks’ focus will have shifted from long-term centre options to those that are best described as medium-term. Those options that move the needle now, and are capable of continuing to move that needle for at least the next couple of seasons…but, at the same time, those options that may not require as expensive an asset cost or as extensive a contract commitment.

Someone who bides time for Cootes to develop, without doing any blocking of his rapid progression.

And who are said medium-term centre options? That will have to be the subject of another article.

For now, we’ll conclude by saying that Cootes came, he saw, and he at least slightly altered the Canucks’ plans at centre. All in the span of a few weeks.