The Vancouver Canucks have been searching for another centre for their NHL roster for quite some time, but on Friday, they finally landed one…or did they?

There’s no doubt that they’ve landed someone. GM Patrik Allvin announced that the Canucks had acquired Lukas Reichel from the Chicago Blackhawks in exchange for the Blackhawks’ own 2027 fourth-round pick, which the Canucks had previously acquired as part of the Ilya Mikheyev trade.

The 23-year-old Reichel, formerly the 17^th overall pick in the 2020 NHL Entry Draft, is now a Canuck, and is expected to make his debut with the team this weekend as they face back-to-back games against the Montreal Canadiens and the Edmonton Oilers. That is not in dispute. What is up for debate, however, is whether or not Reichel should truly count as an NHL centre.

Look around the internet, and you’ll find not only differing openings, but different listings on the subject. Most of Reichel’s draft profiles listed him as a “W/C,” which is code for a player drafted primarily as a centre, but for whom there are doubts about their long-term NHL future at that position. Reichel’s famous uncle, Robert Reichel, was himself a long-time centre.

But since joining the Blackhawks in 2021-22 as a 19-year-old, Reichel has almost never enjoyed a consistent spot in the lineup, and has often been shifted over to the left wing. Enough so that most stat-tracking sites – including HockeyDB, Hockey-Reference, and even the official NHL.com – have Reichel listed as a LW. Only a few sites that specifically focus on potential, like EliteProspects and SportsForecaster, still list Reichel as a centre-wing hybrid.

But those sites may have jumped the gun a bit on relabeling Reichel. He has already played plenty of centre at the NHL level, including as recently as last season.

As a 19-year-old, Reichel got into 11 games for the Blackhawks and recorded just one assist. But he was trusted with some centre duties right off the hop, with his most frequent linemates being wingers Patrick Kane and Brandon Hagel. Not a bad duo to debut between! Reichel averaged a bit more than four faceoffs per game during this time.

Reichel spent the majority of that season in Rockford of the AHL, where he posted 57 points in 56 games and played plenty of centre.

Reichel doubled his NHL games played in 2022-23 with 23, losing his rookie eligibility in the process. This time around, however, Reichel was primarily used on the wing, taking just 13 faceoffs the entire year. Here, Reichel was mostly playing alongside a couple of other pseudo-centres in Andreas Athanasiou and Philipp Kurashev. With 15 points in those 23 games, Reichel had perhaps truly ‘arrived’ in the big leagues, but not as a centre as of yet.

Again, while down in Rockford, he continued to feature more frequently at centre and pile up points as he did.

The now-21-year-old Reichel became a full-time Blackhawk, more or less, as of the 2023-24 season, playing 65 games in Chicago and just ten down in Rockford. Reichel’s time with the Blackhawks this season was a real mixed bag in terms of positioning and linemates.

Reichel took 198 faceoffs in 2023-24, which is a lesser rate than his rookie season but far more than he did as a sophomore. He bounced around lines, with no one line representing more than 12% of his even-strength ice-time. He played a fair bit with rookie centre Connor Bedard, occasionally swapping positions, and also with a bunch of part-time centres like Athanasiou, Kurashev, Tyler Johnson, and Cole Guttman. This led to Reichel taking about three faceoffs per game, but only ever rarely being the dedicated centre on a line, especially over the long-term.

Offence-wise, Reichel really struggled in this 2023-24 season, only barely bettering his previous point total, 16 to 15 – all the while playing in 42 more games.

But in this most recent 2024-25 campaign, the 22-year-old Reichel found both more consistent offence and a more consistent place in the lineup. He took 356 faceoffs across 70 games, a rate of more than five per game. Sure, he only won 39.9% of those faceoffs, but at least he was taking them!

Reichel spent 29% of his even-strength ice-time as a fourth line centre between Pat Maroon and Craig Smith. Those are two veteran wingers, but we now know they were two veteran wingers in their final NHL seasons. Reichel managed to put up ten EV points in about 216 minutes with those two, which seems like a pretty reasonable output given the circumstances. Overall, Reichel posted 22 points in 70 games.

Reichel spent time on centring a few other lines throughout 2024-25, including a line with Maroon and Joey Anderson, a line with Maroon and Tyler Bertuzzi, and a line with Maroon and Landon Slaggert. Reichel was pretty much stapled to Maroon, in other words. He also briefly centred a line with Nick Foligno and Colton Dach.

One player Reichel was kept away from last season was Bedard, with the two only sharing about 2.4% of Reichel’s five-on-five ice-time.

But then this current 2025-26 season arrived, and so, too, did a younger, more exciting centre in Frank Nazar. The one-two punch of Bedard and Nazar at centre pushed Reichel out of the lineup to start, and then fully to the left wing. In his five games thus far on the year, Reichel has two goals and two assists for four points, which is easily the best scoring rate of his career. But he’s got all four of those points from the wing, and three of them from Bedard’s wing, specifically. Through five games, Reichel has taken seven faceoffs and won two of them.

So, as we said at the outset, Reichel arrives in Vancouver still very much ‘TBD’ when it comes to being an NHL centre.

There are those who will say that the updated listings are correct, that Reichel has failed to develop into an NHL centre by now, and that his future will be entirely on the wing. That seems to be how the Blackhawks felt. But when folks say that Reichel hasn’t succeeded as a centre, it must also be said that he hasn’t really succeeded as a winger, either, outside of this brief run of production this season.

There are some factors working against him here. At 6’0” and 170 pounds, Reichel is still incredibly slight. And that career 40.5% faceoff rate isn’t doing him any favours, either.

Then again, Reichel will be 23 years old for the entirety of this season, and that’s still fairly young to be making concrete conclusions about a player. That Reichel has been played at centre as recently as last season, and that he even found mild success there despite some ridiculously-slow linemates shows there still could be something there.

We should mention, this is the Vancouver Canucks we are talking about. Their desperation for a new centre was well-known heading into the season, and that was before Filip Chytil suffered his latest injury.

The Canucks’ centre depth in their most recent games has been Elias Pettersson, the sophomore Aatu Räty, the sophomore Max Sasson, and Nils Åman. What that tells us is that the Canucks are almost certainly going to at least try Reichel at centre sometime shortly after he joins the team.

They’ve got little to lose on that front. And if Reichel can figure the centre position out in this new setting, they’ve potentially got a lot to gain.

Is Lukas Reichel an NHL centre? Not yet. But he’s also not not yet, too.