Team

Betting

CanucksArmy has no direct affiliation to the Vancouver Canucks, Canucks Sports & Entertainment, NHL, or NHLPA

Trade Trees: Tracking the many twists and turns of Canucks acquiring Christian Ehrhoff

Photo credit: Christian Petersen/Getty Images

By Jeff Paterson

Aug 4, 2026, 17:25 EDT

Comments

When the Vancouver Canucks managed to pry Christian Ehrhoff from the San Jose Sharks in the summer of 2009, it was one of the first examples of the hockey club pouncing on an opponent in salary cap peril. At that stage, the Sharks simply had too many other good players making too much money, which forced them to peddle the veteran German blueliner on the heels of a career-best (at the time) 42-point season.

All Ehrhoff did was step into the Canucks lineup, produce 44- and 50-point campaigns and help the hockey club reach the 2011 Stanley Cup Final. He was precisely the kind of player the Canucks needed on their back end at the time, and he proved to be a perfect fit during his two seasons in Vancouver.

Looking back now, it was low-key one of the most one-sided trades in Canucks history as the team acquired Ehrhoff and fellow veteran Brad Lukowich for first-round bust Patrick White along with Daniel Rahimi – neither of whom got a sniff of NHL game action. It was a pure salary dump by the Sharks, and the Canucks were perfectly positioned to take advantage.

The Canucks, however, ran into a similar fate when Ehrhoff was up for a new contract following the Cup run in 2011. Unable to meet his elevated salary demands, his rights were sent to the New York Islanders for a fourth-round pick. The Isles quickly discovered that they wouldn’t be able to afford Ehrhoff, and so they moved him to Buffalo for the same price they had paid to get him from the Canucks. Days later, Ehrhoff signed a wild 10-year $40M contract with the Sabres, which the team bought out just three years later. Ehrhoff went on to play for Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Chicago.

That, however, is not the end of the story.

At the 2012 trade deadline, the Canucks packaged the fourth round pick they received from the Isles along with another fourth rounder of their own and depth defenceman Taylor Ellington and shipped them all to Columbus for veteran checking centre Samuel Pahlsson. The Blue Jackets then used the Islanders’ fourth rounder to select Josh Anderson 95th overall in the 2012 draft.

The other fourth-round pick the Jackets received from the Canucks was flipped to Philadelphia as part of a package to land Sergei Bobrovsky. The Flyers also moved a pick acquired from Columbus to Los Angeles to bring Simon Gagne back into the fold.

So what started as the Canucks seizing an opportunity to land a promising defenceman from a team in salary cap trouble turned into a trade tree involving a number of prominent players, including one in Josh Anderson who is still thriving in the NHL all these years later.