Despite back-to-back seasons near the bottom of the NHL standings in 2016 and 2017, and the loss of core contributors like Bo Horvat and J.T. Miller, the club’s behaviour has never been consistent with what we’ve come to expect from losing franchises. But with Quinn Hughes gone, even Francesco Aquilini has been forced to accept reality and sign off on a rebuild for the first time in his ownership tenure.

Or has he?

As detailed by Patrick Johnston of The Province, Jim Rutherford sounded startlingly similar to the rhetoric of the past when discussing the return in the Quinn Hughes trade in a conversation with reporters last Friday: “We do now need some success in this draft. If we were to do that, we’ll avoid a four- or five-year rebuild.”

While many fans will be relieved to hear the organization finally commit — even if only half-heartedly — to a more forward-looking approach, they should also be wary of any possible attempts to rapidly accelerate out of the rebuild they’ve been reluctantly forced into. After all, this is far from the first time the subject of a rebuild has been broached within the organization, as Johnston outlines in his piece:

There was a time, well two times really, when the Vancouver Canucks’ top hockey man was so roundly rejected by ownership over the idea of going young, of eschewing the playoffs, to reset the roster for the long haul, that the top man was swiftly shown the door.
If you’ve read these pages long enough, you know what happened to both Mike Gillis and Trevor Linden. To recap, for those who don’t know: Gillis, in 2014, and Linden, in 2018, essentially told Canucks chairman Francesco Aquilini that what the team needed to do was give up on the idea of playoff games for a couple of seasons, focus fully on grabbing a boat-load of talented young players, and do everything you could to assemble an army of guys who would pay out in a year or two or three.

Back in November, I wrote about what the Canucks could learn from the last time they held an auction on so many of their veteran players. The series of events that led up to Hughes’ departure are similarly instructive, and indicative of the organization’s consistent refusal to accept reality and allow the NHL’s draft system to work as designed and reward the teams closest to the bottom of the standings.

To understand how the Canucks ended up squandering Quinn Hughes’ prime, we must return to when he first joined the organization in 2018. Henrik and Daniel Sedin had announced their retirement in April, and the club would never be more justified in embracing a more future-forward team-building strategy with their two aging superstars and pillars of the community out of the picture. Instead, just a few days after Hughes fell unexpectedly to the Canucks at 8th overall in the 2018 NHL Entry Draft, the Canucks stepped up to the plate and whiffed on a series of free agent signings. The club allocated nearly 10% of the cap to identical four-year, 12-million-dollar contracts to Jay Beagle and Antoine Roussel, and another 2-year, $3.8 million contract for Tim Schaller. The deals to Roussel and Beagle in particular were roundly criticized at the time by fans and various members of the local media for encroaching on what was assumed to be the Canucks’ future contention window. Here’s an entry from a piece published to CanucksArmy shortly after the deals were signed.

“What really stings is that the Canucks have saddled themselves with deals that are likely to cause problems during what should eventually be their competitive window. By all accounts, the Canucks should be good by the time Beagle and Roussel reach the third year of their deals. Bo Horvat will be 27 when those deals expire. We aren’t talking about players who will be gone when the team is competitive again. We’re talking about players who will be eating up salary and roster spots when the team’s best young players are in their prime. In the final years of those contracts, Roussel and Beagle can’t just be taking up space. They have to help the team win and be worth the money that’s being allocated to their services.”

Compounding the issue was the fact that the Canucks had already saddled themselves with a number of ugly long-term contracts in prior seasons under then-Canucks GM Jim Benning. In addition to the four-year contracts to Beagle and Roussel, the Canucks also had four more years of Loui Eriksson at an average annual value (AAV) of $6 million (4.77% of the cap in 2018) and another three of Erik Gudbranson at $4 million AAV (3.18% of 2018 cap) and Sam Gagner at $3.15 million (2.5% of 2018 cap).

Overall, this meant the club had roughly 20% or one-fifth of their 2018 salary cap tied up in deeply inefficient expenditures on players who played at or just above replacement level, and they were going to carry many of these expenditures into the period after Quinn Hughes and Elias Pettersson’s entry-level contracts were set to expire. The dead weight represented by Gudbranson’s contract was doubly galling because the club had given up a skilled forward in Jared McCann, who would later go on to record several 30-goal seasons, in exchange for Gudbranson in one of the club’s many attempts to accelerate the timeline on returning to the playoffs.

The following season, the team continued their trend of overcommitting to inefficient contracts by signing Tyler Myers to a five-year, 30-million dollar deal. While Myers has generally been a good Canuck, it didn’t make sense for a team in Vancouver’s position to pay so much for a luxury item following a year in which they finished well outside the playoffs for the third consecutive season.

The team also pulled off a surprise trade for J.T. Miller at the 2019 draft that had a wide range of positive and negative consequences. The early returns were good, as the Canucks went on a surprise run to game seven of the second round in the 2020 bubble playoffs, thanks in large part to the play of Miller alongside Elias Pettersson and Brock Boeser.

While Miller ended up being well worth the price the Canucks paid for him from a pure hockey value perspective, his acquisition also spelled the end of any hopes of a more long-term rebuild. The 2020 playoff run would prove to be a mirage, but Miller helped the Canucks stay out of the basement over some incredibly lean years, which once again prevented them from picking high in the draft.

By 2021, the Canucks’ poor salary cap management had caught up with them. Many of their signings were premised on the assumption of infinite cap growth, which was stalled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a result, they were unable to retain any of Chris Tanev, Jacob Markstrom, Tyler Toffoli, or Troy Stecher in free agency. This cost them the kind of quality veteran leadership that could help the club build and maintain the winning culture it desired because it had spent too much money on the wrong players at the wrong time.

It also forced them into signing Elias Pettersson to a three-year bridge deal and Quinn Hughes to an uncommon six-year deal that effectively walked him directly to unrestricted free agency. Had the club kept its powder dry and simply avoided allocating so much of their cap space to luxury items while the team sat at the bottom of the standings, they would have been able to lock up both players to max-term deals, which would have given them an additional two years of control on Quinn Hughes. While Pettersson’s decline in play over the last two years has been incredibly disappointing, signing him to an 8-year deal at a lower cost back in 2021 would have mitigated the issues the club has had with him since signing his whopping $11.6-million AAV extension back in 2024. They also traded the expiring Beagle, Roussel, and Eriksson contracts in a package for Conor Garland and Oliver Ekman-Larsson, in a move so disastrous that it forced the Canucks to execute the largest ordinary-course buyout in league history for OEL quickly into his tenure with the Canucks.

In the 2022-23 season, the Miller trade would continue to have unintended consequences as the Canucks, unable to keep both him and Bo Horvat due to prior cap mismanagement, traded the Canucks’ captain away in February. The decision to re-sign Miller over Horvat has come under fire recently, and CA’s own Ethan Van Dop explored whether the Canucks would have been better off choosing Horvat in a piece earlier this week.

The club also fired Bruce Boudreau and hired Rick Tocchet mid-season in a very public and embarrassing fashion. Nonplussed by the idea of pulling the chute on another failed season and potentially having a chance at adding Connor Bedard to their lineup, the Canucks once again prioritized meaningless short-term success and sewered their draft position.

But once again, the early returns were looking good. Tocchet had straightened the team out defensively and Filip Hronek, who was acquired for yet another first round pick, had given Quinn Hughes a legitimate partner on the top pair for the first time since the departure of Chris Tanev.

The Canucks surprised fans by winning their division and taking the juggernaut Edmonton Oilers to Game 7 of the Western Conference Semifinals in 2024, but their success was once again short-lived. They finished outside the playoffs yet again in the following season, and Tocchet quickly departed for greener pastures in Philadelphia.

In the midst of another lost season, word spread that a rift had emerged between J.T. Miller and Elias Pettersson, the team’s best and two highest-paid forwards. The situation had deteriorated to the point where the club was once again forced to make a choice between Miller and another player, this time choosing Pettersson. By taking the team’s biggest strength — its depth at centre — and effectively flushing it down the toilet in the span of two years, the final finger on the monkey’s paw the Canucks had bought when they acquired Miller back in 2019 had curled.

Rebuilds don’t necessarily have to take a long time. The Canucks’ attempted rebuild-on-the-fly could have worked, but the Canucks simply weren’t aggressive enough in the right areas. A few years of purposeful losing and abstaining from long-term free agent signings would have left the Canucks with room to lock up Hughes and Pettersson to max-term deals and left a ton of money to play with left over to complement those players. One wonders what a team that had retained prospects like McCann and Gustav Forsling and gotten a few more high-end draft picks in exchange for its veteran players could have achieved. One also wonders if the team could have kept that good thing going after the 2020 playoffs had it spent its money more efficiently and been able to retain some of the veteran skill and leadership it claimed to value so much it had to spend to the cap and trade away picks and prospects in exchange for meaningless wins for much of the past decade.

Instead, what many of us feared at the time ended up coming true. That chase for meaningless wins in lost seasons ended up costing them wins once their contention window had opened. And that failure to capitalize on Quinn Hughes’ prime cost them the best defenceman and arguably even the best player in franchise history.

The Canucks need to learn from the mistakes of the past and finally embrace a few years of asset accumulation to effectively build a contender.

They refused to rebuild in 2014, and accelerated out of the one that was foisted upon them through circumstance in 2018. If they take the same approach this time, don’t be surprised if they find themselves in the same position with the next great Canucks prospect five or six years down the road.

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