We’ve got about nine months on our hands before the Quinn Hughes contract extension – or lack thereof – becomes the one and only talking point surrounding the Vancouver Canucks.

For right now, however, we’ve got another Hughes extension – or lack thereof – worth talking about, and this one involves Quinn’s brother, Luke.

Having just turned 22 a week ago, Luke is the youngest of the three Hughes brothers, and at 6’2”, he’s also the largest. But he’s also the only one of the trio currently without a contract.

Luke was drafted by the New Jersey Devils at fourth overall in the 2021 NHL Entry Draft. He played two years of NCAA hockey at the University of Michigan thereafter and then joined the Devils for two regular season and three postseason games at the tail end of the 2022-23 season.

The following year, Luke managed 47 points in 82 games as a rookie. Then last year, as a sophomore, Luke put up 44 points in just 71 games as he suffered through a couple of different injuries.

At which point the third year in his entry-level contract ran out, and Hughes became a restricted free agent.

Technically, Luke has been eligible to sign an extension with the Devils since July 1, 2025. But that hasn’t happened. Now, here we are at the cusp of Training Camp 2025, and Hughes is one of two prominent RFAs still left unsigned – with Mason McTavish of the Anaheim Ducks being the other.

It’s a genuine contract holdout. And given that the New Jersey – and national – media have been speculating about Quinn Hughes’ future every time the Canucks’ captain has breathed this past summer, it only seems fair to use this as an opportunity to speculate about what Luke’s stalled negotiations might mean for the Canucks.

The issue appears to be one of terminology. Reporting from earlier in the offseason had it that Luke wanted a five-year term, so that this contract would end at the same time as that of his brother and teammate, Jack. The Devils, on the other hand, don’t seem to want to set themselves up for double-negotiations in a half-decade, and so they’re angling for either a three-year bridge deal or a long-term, eight-year extension. Both sides seem to be at an impasse for now.

We’ll start with what this doesn’t mean for the Canucks, and that’s an opportunity to offer sheet Hughes. For one, they do not have the draft capital or cap space to pull that off. For another, and more importantly, Hughes is a “10.2.c” RFA who has only officially played two professional seasons, and is thus ineligible for an offer sheet. So, give up on that dream right away.

And unless this holdout goes on for a lot longer, we can probably also dispense with the notion of a trade in the immediate future. Luke is still a big part of the Devils’ plans to compete with this Hughes-Nico Hischier core down the middle, and even if the best they do is a bridge deal, that will still give them at least a few more years with him. It would take a true breakdown of negotiations to get the Devils to even consider selling a 22-year-old top-pairing defender.

But we don’t need a total collapse of the working relationship between the Devils and Luke for the relationship to be damaged, in general. If we flip back to the Anaheim Ducks for a moment, their fanbase is decidedly more worried about their holdout situation with McTavish. One of the reasons for this is that they’ve already sat through similar holdouts with Jamie Drysdale and Trevor Zegras in recent years, and the end result was both players being shipped out of town. The longer that negotiations drag on – especially past the point at which teams have returned to the ice – the better the chances of some feelings being frayed.

Meanwhile, were Luke to ask how things are going in Vancouver, he’ll hear from Quinn something along the lines of “Well, they extended my two best friends long-term a year ahead of time, and they’ve more-or-less told me I’ll be getting a blank cheque in July with my name on it.”

That can’t help but sound like a comparatively good luck for the Canucks, who have been forced to constantly wrestle with the possibility of their franchise player eventually leaving to join his brothers in New Jersey. It could probably be stated, without too much controversy, that the more Devils GM Tom Fitzgerald ticks off Luke and his camp over the next couple of days and/or weeks, the less chance that the inevitable Hughes Reunion takes place in New Jersey.

From this perspective, Canucks fans should really be hoping for this holdout to drag on and on and on…

There may also be some good indicators here about what the eventual negotiations with Quinn might look like. If it’s true that Luke is dead-set on timing his new contract to end at the same time as Jack’s, one has to imagine that’s a family plan, and one has to imagine that Quinn is aware of it. Thus, it wouldn’t be particularly surprising for Quinn to walk into Patrik Allvin’s office in nine months and ask for a three-year extension, timed to end in 2030 so that he and Jack – and Luke, if he gets his way – could all be unrestricted free agents at the same time, and choose their new mutual NHL home together.

If that comes to pass, we don’t imagine he’ll have as tough a time getting the Canucks on board with that as Luke is currently having with the Devils. From where we’re sitting, the Vancouver office would be grateful to sign their captain to an extension of any length.

At which point, it’s all too tempting to tie these two threads of thought together.  Imagine, if you will, that the Devils eventually acquiesce to Luke’s demands to sign a five-year extension, but only after a lengthy holdout that costs Luke his training camp, his preseason, and maybe even a little of his preseason – to say nothing of any salary he has to compromise in order to get his preferred term.

Then let’s imagine that the Canucks respond with a “yes, of course” when Quinn asks for a three-year extension next summer.

Come 2030, when all three Hughes brothers are UFAs, which team banner are they more likely to unite under: that of the team that made it easy for them to join one another, or the team that fought their youngest brother tooth-and-nail on his first contract extension?

We realize we’re well past the point of speculation here and into direct fantasizing. But we’ll ask you to consider the reaction if Jack and Luke were already under contract elsewhere, and the Canucks were negotiating this hard with Quinn. The general vibe would be that of fear that the Canucks might chase Quinn away into the waiting arms of his brothers. The Devils should reasonably feel a bit of that same fear right now. In pushing Luke negotiations this far, they could feasibly be playing with fire.

Or, maybe not. Perhaps it is Luke’s camp that will cave, giving in to that three-year bridge or cashing in on a full eight years. In any case, the true implications of these stalled negotiations probably won’t be felt until years down the road.

But with a Hughes reunion on the line, it’s hard not to want to speculate, even just a little.