It’s February, March is coming, and the Vancouver Canucks may be considering shopping for expensive players as the NHL Trade Deadline approaches. Sound familiar? It should, but this time, there’s a difference. Instead of chasing a playoff spot – and, at the same time, lowering their draft lottery odds – this time around, the Canucks are said to be chasing longer-term goals.

This time around, if the Canucks are going to be adding anyone with a considerable price tag, they’re going to be doing so in the form of a cap dump. And taking on cap dumps can come with a whole host of benefits that pay off down the road, as opposed to right now.

We’ve written already about the Canucks’ ability to take on cap dumps in general, and found them to have plenty of cap space available for that purpose – and the ability to create more through things like LTIR, if they so choose. We’ve also already written about the potential for the Canucks to take on some “flippable” cap dumps with term left, so as to profit twice over, once through being paid to take on a player, and again through trading that player with retention in a future season.

And now, we’ve got an interesting rumoured case study to further illustrate how all this might work.

Warren Foegele, currently of the Los Angeles Kings, is a nine-year NHL veteran. The 29-year-old has scored as many as 24 goals and 46 points in a single season, with both highs being set last year. The 6’2”, 205-pound Foegele is described as someone with a lot of physical gifts, primarily in that combination of size and speed, but not an abundance of skill. He’s traditionally worked hard to contribute from wherever in the lineup he finds himself, and has seemed to get better with age.

Except, that is, for this current 2025-26 season. This year, Foegele has fallen off the proverbial cliff. He’s gone from that career high of 24 goals and 46 points to just six goals and eight points in 43 games thus far. That’s a pace of just 14 points across an entire 82-game schedule, which would be a lower total than Foegele has ever achieved, including his rookie season.

Of course, Foegele isn’t going to play 82 games this season. Primarily because his play has recently made him a healthy scratch for the Kings. He sat out the most recent four games for LA heading into the Olympic Break. And now, Elliotte Friedman is reporting that Foegele is someone the Kings would prefer to move on from as they attempt to create more cap space for other acquisitions.

The Kings have already taken their big swing, picking up a 50% retained Artemi Panarin for prospect Liam Greentree and some conditional picks (and then signing Panarin to a two-year extension). But, as Friedman puts it, the Kings would still prefer to add more if they could, and specifically another top-six centre.

The desire to do so should be fairly obvious. The Kings would sure love to at least make the playoffs in what will be Anze Kopitar’s final season, and they’ve already invested some considerable resources into doing so, but they’re still going to be in tough. Heading into the Olympic Break, the Kings are three points back of the Anaheim Ducks for the final wild card spot in the West, and need all the help they can get to climb further.

But if they’re going to go shopping for pieces as big as Vincent Trocheck, as Friedman suggests, they’re going to need a bit more roster and cap space, both now and into future seasons. The player they’d like to move in order to create that space is, naturally, the one they’re not using right now in Foegele. And here is where the Canucks could enter the picture.

Foegle could be exactly what the Canucks are looking for in a flippable cap dump. He is enough in the way of the situation in Los Angeles that they should be willing to pay to get rid of him. No one is going to take a player with eight points and a $3.5 million cap hit off of waivers, and that salary is too big to bury – and it carries on into next season. To ditch Foegele right here and right now, it would probably cost the Kings a mid-round pick of some sort, and that’s something the Canucks could certainly use more of.

But acquiring a cap dump like Foegele is less about that initial payment, and more about what he can eventually be turned into. Because Foegele is a cap dump, yes, but he’s also one with excessive rebound potential. He is, after all, just one year removed from a 24-goal campaign, and he had 20 the year before that. It’s entirely possible that all Foegele is experiencing right now is a one-off, ill-timed slump. At 29, he’s a little too young to have really fallen off any age-based cliffs. And that means the chances of Foegele rebounding into someone the Canucks could sell at a profit by next season is higher than it is with most cap dumps, and that should have the interest of Vancouver management.

This is especially true if the Canucks succeed in selling off some of their veterans within this 2025-26 season. Sell Evander Kane to the highest bidder, for example, and then hand his role and minutes off to Foegele. That provides an adequate veteran replacement in the short-term, and it gives Foegele the best chance of finding his offence again.

Flash-forward to the 2026-27 season. If the Canucks have got Foegele back to somewhere around 20-goal-pace territory by then, at that point, they can begin to shop him around. A rebounded Foegele, now a pending UFA, suddenly becomes a much more appealing trade target than he is right now.

That’s the kind of player that could return something like a second round pick in the right circumstances, and probably at least a third.

So, all told, by acquiring and rehabilitating the play of Foegele within this season, the Canucks could get a mid-round pick now and something better next year, and in between they’d have some decent veteran coverage on their roster to make it all the more easy to trade off other veterans, something that brings more profit to the table.

One even wonders if that first payoff is truly necessary. Maybe the Canucks could really help the Kings out by taking on Foegele for essentially free right now, or for “future considerations,” and bank it all on his reboundability. As far as cap dumps worth making that bet on, one won’t find too many better than Foegele out there.

Really, it’s hard to think of any reasons not to do something like this, so long as Foegele’s measly five-team no-trade clause doesn’t get in the way. It’s the kind of double-dipping asset management that is not just smart business but could also help the Canucks make up for years of neglecting future assets. The rebuild has started a step or two behind as a result, but steps can always be made up.

Acquiring a player in the midst of the worst season of their career may not be an exciting idea on the surface of it. But such buy-low transactions can pay off big down the road, and down the road is exactly where the Canucks need to be thinking about right now – even if “down the road” just means to the 2027 NHL Trade Deadline.

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