Quinn Hughes always had a hard time losing. That much was obvious on the ice, off the ice, and very frequently on his face.

We heard that Hughes wanted to play with his brothers in New Jersey. We heard that he had a preference for the Eastern Conference. But in the end, Hughes was traded to the Minnesota Wild. Which fulfills perhaps Hughes’ most important and direct desire: to play for a winning team.

Playing for a winner was never Hughes’ stated reason for not wanting to re-sign in Vancouver, but it had to be a factor. That much became visually apparent the longer the disaster of the 2025-26 unfolded. In joining the Wild, Hughes is undoubtedly going to win more hockey games in the near future.

But will he win enough? Will he win hockey’s ultimate prize, the Stanley Cup? Though emotions are still raw and we realize not everyone will want to think about this just yet, it’s what we are here to ponder today.

Hughes making the playoffs now is all but a guarantee. As of this Sunday morning writing, the Wild are in third place in the Central Division with 41 points, and have an eight-point lead and a game-in-hand over the Utah Mammoth in fourth place. Add Hughes to the mix, and it’s really hard to imagine Utah closing that gap in the second half.

In fact, it looks really likely that the Central will finish with the exact same top-three it has right now, and in the same order: Colorado in first by a big country mile, followed by Dallas, then followed by Minnesota.

But Hughes probably didn’t go to the Twin Cities with the goal of just making the playoffs. He’ll want to make some noise once there, and that looks like a bit of a bigger challenge for the Wild.

Because of the way the playoffs are set right now, Minnesota has to escape the Central Division. There is a good chance that the Avalanche, Stars, and Wild end up one, two, and three in the entire Western Conference, not just the Central, but that doesn’t make a difference. The two and three seeds in the Central still have to face each other in the first round, and that’s a tough draw.

The odds of the Wild overtaking the Avalanche are slim. Not only are the Avs an absolute wagon right now, they’ve already earned a full 12-point lead over the Wild that will be nearly impossible to overcome.

So, even here in December, we can feel confident in predicting that the Wild are going to face the Dallas Stars in the first round. And then, if they’re fortunate enough to make it through that, they’ve almost certainly got a date with the Avalanche.

It’s an interesting place for Hughes to wind up, really. In any other division, he’d arrive as the undisputed new best defender in town. But in the Central Division, specifically, he ranks behind Cale Makar of the Avalanche, and has decent competition for the #2 spot in Dallas’ Miro Heiskanen.

The addition of Hughes to the likes of Brock Faber, Jared Spurgeon, Jonas Brodin, and Jacob Middleton does probably give the Wild the best blueline in the division. But with the Stars (Heiskanen, Thomas Harley, Esa Lindell) and especially the Avalanche (Makar, Devon Toews, Sam Girard, Josh Manson, Brent Burns, Sam Malinski) already possessing such strong bluelines of their own, the gap hasn’t widened as much as one might think it would.

Similarly, had Hughes gone to a team as strong as the Wild in another division, he’d probably be joining what is considered a true contender. But the Wild’s placement beneath the Avalanche and Stars, perhaps the two most contender-y contenders in the NHL this season, has often led to them being an afterthought.

If the NHL still did its playoffs in a 1-8 format (or, even better, a 1-16) instead of division-locking its matchups, we’d probably be talking about Minnesota very differently. But that’s just not the current reality.

Most odds-makers have the Wild outside of the top-ten most likely Cup-winners. That probably should change now that they’ve added Hughes, in a vacuum, but the question remains of whether Hughes is enough to boost the Wild past the Stars and then Avalanche, and that’s tough to say at this point.

The Wild roster is not without its holes. Somewhat ironically, Hughes has left the Canucks to go to the only playoff-bound team that might actually have worse centre depth, especially since Marco Rossi went to Vancouver as part of the return.

Their top centre, Joel Eriksson Ek, is much like the Canucks’ Elias Pettersson in that he is excellent defensively, but probably needs to contribute more offensively (albeit at half the price.)

Rossi’s vacated 2C role goes to the 21-year-old Danila Yurov, who has eight points in 25 games as an NHL rookie.

Then Ryan Hartman and Nico Sturm round out the bottom-six.

That’s really not a contending amount of centre depth, and it really pales in comparison to the Avalanche’s set of Nathan MacKinnon, Brock Nelson, Ross Colton, and Jack Drury, or the Stars’ set of Roope Hintz, Wyatt Johnston, Matt Duchene, and Radek Faksa.

It seems a massive gap for the Wild to overcome if they’re hoping to make it past the first two rounds of the 2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs.

The Wild could, of course, improve from here on out. Even with Hughes on board, they’re about a million under the cap, and that amount could increase as players come off the IR. They’re currently projecting to have a little under $4 million in space come the Trade Deadline, and they could aim to make a cap dump or two to add to that amount.

Strangely enough, Hughes might just have found himself in a very similar spot in Minnesota, on a team that desperately needs to add a top-six centre. Without that, it’s tough to project major success in this season for the Wild.

Of course, stranger things have happened. Maybe injuries strike the Avalanche and the Stars at the right time. Or, maybe Hughes well and truly elevates the Minnesota lineup. It is true that Hughes has never before played with a forward as talented as Kirill Kaprizov – save for, perhaps, in international hockey. Maybe the two of them really click, and that alone carries the Wild on to the next tier of contention.

There’s also the 2026-27 season to consider, because the Wild will still have Hughes under contract for at least that long, barring a further trade. But an extra year doesn’t really change any of the circumstances we’ve talked about here. The Avalanche have almost all of their key talent under contract through next year, with only Martin Necas getting a notable raise. The Stars will have a trickier time as they try to negotiate a Jason Robertson extension, but Tyler Seguin’s serious injury might just have given them all the cap space they’ll need for that.

Has Hughes joined a better team than the Canucks in joining the Minnesota Wild? There’s not much doubt about that. Nor is there much doubt that he’ll be returning to the playoffs in 2026.

But the odds of Hughes becoming a Stanley Cup champion in the near future with his new team still seem incredibly long, and that’s mostly due to the fact that he’s been traded from hockey’s weakest division to its strongest.