Mike Tyson once famously stated, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

In Vancouver Canucks terms, ‘punched in the mouth’ can definitely equate to ‘suffer a long-term injury to Quinn Hughes.’

We hope our readers got plenty of good tidings and cheer over the holidays because the Canucks themselves did not. Whispers of potential injuries to both Hughes and Elias Pettersson coming out of the last pre-holiday game were confirmed when both players missed the first game back against Seattle on Saturday. Then, they were confirmed to be more than just one-game absences.

According to Canucks head coach Rick Tocchet, Pettersson should be back in about a week’s time after the Canucks complete a brief two-game trip to Calgary and Seattle.

Hughes, on the other hand, received the dreaded ‘week-to-week’ status, which in this market can mean anything from a fortnight to forever. And that could create some serious issues for the Canucks.

Actually, let us correct ourselves. This will create some serious issues for the Canucks, at least as far as the on-ice product is concerned. Hughes isn’t just the team’s best and most valuable player; he’s been the leading candidate for league MVP throughout the entirety of 2024/25. One cringes at the thought of the Canucks going a month or more without Hughes on the ice and what it might do to their overall performance.

Which brings us neatly enough to the other area in which the Hughes absence (and Pettersson’s, too) could cause serious issues, and that’s in the front office – and, more specifically, in that front office’s plans for between now and the 2025 Trade Deadline.

A lot in hockey comes down to the timing, and here, the timing is extremely awkward.

As of this writing, the NHL’s 2025 Trade Deadline – set for March 7, 2025 – is two months and a week away. Nobody is expecting Hughes to miss that much time. But how much of that time he misses between now and then will have to play a role in how GM Patrik Allvin and Co. make their moves approaching and at the deadline.

Here on New Year’s Eve Eve, the Canucks are just barely hanging on to the last Wild Card spot in the Western Conference. It’s pretty hard to imagine the Canucks climbing up the standings without Pettersson and Hughes for the time being. At best, it’s hoped that they can tread water. That means when Hughes returns in a few weeks time, the team will still be in a bit of an uncertain position, and now with the deadline breathing down their neck.

The exact timing here could become complicated by the schedule. Let’s say that Hughes misses the entirety of January, and then a little of February. That would be an approximately five-and-a-half week absence – not outside the bounds of reality for ‘week-to-week.’

Well, at that point, you can slap another two weeks to his time away from the team because, as of February 8, the league is on a two-week hiatus to host The 4 Nations Face-Off (which Hughes is scheduled to participate in).

The NHL returns to action on February 22, at which point the Trade Deadline is just two weeks away. Can the Canucks really be expected to make an informed decision on supplementing their roster when that roster has been without its best player for more than a month? Even worse, it’s a five-game road trip for the Canucks immediately after the 4 Nations, then a single home game, then Deadline Day.

Hughes doesn’t necessarily have to miss that long to complicate things, either. It’s all pretty crucial assessment time for this front office, and that might be less of a problem if they had a better idea of what they have on their hands already. But they don’t.

The 2024/25 Canucks have been a real conundrum. There has been Thatcher Demko’s recovery, JT Miller’s absence, Filip Hronek’s injury, the rumours of an off-ice rift, so-so starts from the team’s two best centres, and general inconsistencies on the back end. That’s already an outright abundance of question marks on the topic of whether this edition of the team is truly worth investing in.

Fans and media alike have suggested that we haven’t seen the best of these Canucks yet, and that’s probably fair. But the Pettersson and Hughes injuries could now conspire to ensure that we don’t get to see the best of these Canucks at any point prior to the deadline, and that makes deciding what to do at the deadline exceptionally difficult.

As we said, Hughes is returning, at best, to a team still holding onto a playoff spot by the skin of their teeth. At worst, it’s to a team that has slipped just slightly outside of the postseason picture.

Is that a team worth investing in? There were many who suggested earlier in the year that, with how the Canucks were playing, any expiring rentals should be avoided at this year’s deadline. The thinking goes that rentals are an investment in just this singular season, and the Canucks just might not ‘have it’ this year – which would then tip them toward either trading for players with more term on their contracts or simply saving their tradeable assets for future years.

And if that’s how folks were thinking prior to the Pettersson and Hughes injuries, what are they thinking now?

If it were as simple as being able to state with certainty that the team could contend once Pettersson and Hughes returned, that would be one thing. But the start of this season featured both players, and the Canucks still struggled to look like a true contender. Allvin and Co. are now faced with the choice of how to get the best out of a roster that hasn’t looked its own best yet and that now won’t until the very cusp of the deadline, at the earliest.

All that said, giving up entirely is not an option. Hughes will return, and he’ll return as – still – the best player in franchise history. He’s only going to be in his playing prime for so long. The Canucks need to take their best shots at contending in those years, period.

So, if an opportunity comes up to improve the team both in this season and over the next few, the Canucks should still take it. We’re talking, perhaps, a Rasmus Andersson-type here, someone who doesn’t just represent a one-time investment in 2024/25’s fortunes.

But trading away picks and prospects for players on expiring contracts — like the team did last year with Nikita Zadorov and Elias Lindholm — will be much harder to justify this season. It arguably was already going to be prior to these injuries, and it’s hard to imagine the front office gaining faith in this team without Hughes on the ice for the foreseeable future.

It once looked as simple as adding a top-four defender to this roster around the Trade Deadline and then sailing into the playoffs as an even better team than last year’s edition. Not only does the solution no longer look nearly as simple, but there are valid questions about whether there’s a solution to be found within this season at all.

We don’t see this extending so far that the Canucks flip in the complete other direction and become sellers themselves. But then, stranger things have happened, and the Canucks do have some enticing pending UFAs to offer…

Of course, a lot can change over the course of two months. And, hey, an injury prior to the Trade Deadline is still better than one after the Trade Deadline. Things aren’t necessarily over for the 2024/25 Canucks.

They’re just more complicated.