No butts about it; by now, you’ve heard the scuttle surrounding the Vancouver Canucks.

As usual, the sharer of said scuttlebutt is one Elliotte Friedman, who both reported on renewed/continued tension within the Canucks’ dressing room and then went as far as to suggest an impending trade: one of Elias Pettersson to Buffalo in exchange for Bowen Byram and Dylan Cozens.

Now, even Friedman himself couched that as pure speculation, and it doesn’t take any award-winning analysis to tell you why it won’t happen. Any way you slice it, that’s a bad deal for the Canucks.

But maybe a bad deal is inevitable when it comes to the notion of trading Pettersson in the first place. Hockey history will show that teams who trade players as good as Pettersson don’t tend to win those trades…or many games in the immediate aftermath.

Before we get into that, we’ll briefly define what we mean by “as good as Pettersson” and try to avoid getting too into the weeds of debate. We think there’s an argument to be made, at various points, for Pettersson to be considered a top-ten NHL centre. At worst, he’s still probably nestled somewhere in the top 20. So, we’ll skip the back-and-forth and just say he’s at least a top-20 talent at his position and leave it at that.

Age is also crucial to this discussion. Pettersson just turned 26 a month ago and has thus fully entered what is meant to be his prime years.

So, when we say “as good as Pettersson,” we mean a player who is already recognized as a top-20 talent in their position by the age of 26. How many of such players have been traded in recent memory? A few, but not many. Enough, as it is, to establish a trend.

The first name that got trotted out as a comparison to a theoretical Pettersson trade was that of Matthew Tkachuk. He was traded by the Calgary Flames at the age of 24, just coming off a 104-point season, with a fourth-round pick attached for Jonathan Huberdeau, MacKenzie Weegar, Cole Schwindt, and a conditional first.

The trade was a fairly unmitigated disaster for the Flames. They’ve turned in around a bit this year, but Huberdeau was signed to a boat anchor of a contract extension and has produced just 128 points across parts of three seasons for the Flames since the trade.

Tkachuk, meanwhile, has 228 points for the Panthers since. And a Stanley Cup.

This trade was a massive loss for the Calgary Flames.

Another transaction that has drawn comparisons to the theoretical Pettersson move, especially since it involves Buffalo, is the Jack Eichel trade. He was also traded at the age of 24, and here, the Pettersson parallels might be even stronger, with Eichel also suffering from a damaged reputation due to injury and inconsistent performance.

Eichel was dealt with a third-round pick to Vegas in exchange for Alex Tuch, Peyton Krebs, a first-rounder, and a conditional third that turned into a second. It’s a decent haul. Tuch has really turned into a useful player, and those picks are nice.

But Eichel has put up 201 points in 195 games for Vegas, and, like Tkachuk, he’d won a Stanley Cup within two years of being dealt. They didn’t have much of a choice when it came to keeping him, but we can chalk this one up as yet another in a long line of trade losses for the Buffalo Sabres.

Speaking of Buffalo, we’ve heard the Sam Reinhart trade brought up in this discussion, but we’re not so sure it qualifies. It’s true that the Sabres dealt Reinhart at age 26, but it’s hard to argue that he was seen as a top-20 talent at that point in time, coming off a 40-point season with a career-high of 65.

In any case, if you do count it, you can count it as another big loss for Buffalo. They got Devon Levi and a first-rounder back for him, only to watch Reinhart immediately ascend to PPG status with the Panthers and then ascend further into being an outright top-ten NHL player. Oh, and he won a Cup, too.

Trades like this are rare enough that we’ve got to go quite a ways back to find more examples.

Fellow Canadian franchise Ottawa has provided two such examples in the past decade. The first was the trade of 27-year-old Erik Karlsson to San Jose, which falls a little out of our age range but bears mentioning all the same.

Karlsson, already a two-time Norris winner by then, was traded with Francis Perron in exchange for Chris Tierney, Rudolfs Balcers, Josh Norris, Dylan DeMelo, and a 2020 first-round pick that turned into Tim Stutzle.

Now, the Sharks didn’t get a Cup out of Karlsson, but they did get a 96-point season and another Norris, and either way, they definitely won the trade as Ottawa did even less with their end of it. In any case, this was a weird one, because of an injury that involved Karlsson literally losing a piece of his foot. And oddly enough, it proved to be one of the more lucrative trades of a superstar. A more relevant example would be coming from the same franchise shortly.

The next year, the Senators traded Mark Stone, then 26, to Vegas. Stone was coming off a season of 62 points in 58 games and was working on a new career high at the time. He went for Erik Brännström (!), Oscar Lindberg, and a second-round pick, a return that seems impossibly low now. Stone would continue to develop into one of the world’s best wingers and also a darn fine cap circumventer, to boot. He also won a Cup with Vegas.

A more recent Canadian example would be the Winnipeg Jets trading the 22-year-old Patrik Laine to Columbus with Jack Roslovic in exchange for Pierre-Luc Dubois and a third-round pick. Laine wasn’t exactly a raging success for the CBJ, but he was a hell of a lot better than Pierre-Luc Dubois, that’s for sure.

We struggle to find other relevant examples without going back a full decade to that infamous Taylor Hall for Adam Larsson swap, and we all know how that is remembered. That same day, the Montreal Canadiens sent a 26-year-old PK Subban to the Nashville Predators, and that might be the one example we can find of a top-20 talent being flipped and the team coming away at least even in the exchange – the exchange in this case being a 30-year-old Shea Weber.

The only other example we can find where a team maybe traded a 26-and-under star and didn’t lose the trade was when Columbus sent Seth Jones to Chicago in 2021 for a whopping return of Adam Boqvist, two first-rounders, and a second.

There can be little doubt that Columbus came out ahead here. But what’s not certain is whether Jones, 26 at the time of the trade, was still considered a top-20 defender. Coming off a 28-point season with defensive shortcomings, probably not. That’s why the Blue Jackets look like winners, trading off on former hype and accomplishments for a sizeable return.

But that’s as close as we can come to a team trading a player in the same career position and prominence as Pettersson and coming out ahead. Which, we surmise, does not bode well for the Canucks’ chances of trading Pettersson and walking away as winners.

It’s just not the kind of thing that happens.

Which makes sense. The old maxim goes that the team that wins a trade is the team that comes away with the best player. When auctioning off a superstar, that’s pretty much impossible to do. So, the return always winds up being some collection of lesser pieces, and they never add up to the sum of the pieces being traded away in the first place.

Or, at least, they haven’t yet.