There’s no better time than the dog days of summer to play a little game of What If… Uatu likely know by now that it’s one of our favourite things to do on this site.

For today’s hypothetical alternative history, we’re not going too terribly far into the past. Only a couple of years, back to the year 2024 and what turned out to be a fairly momentous decision for the Vancouver Canucks.

Heading toward the 2024 Trade Deadline, the Canucks had a difficult issue on their hands. Elias Pettersson was a pending restricted free agent at the end of the season, and negotiations on an extension were more than a little contentious.

At the time, Pettersson was 25 and had just come off a 102-point season in 2022-23. More than that, by March 1, he was already up to 75 points in 62 games on the 2023-24 campaign, just off-pace for a second consecutive 100-point showing.

This was, as it would turn out, Peak Pettersson.

Ultimately, the Canucks would decide to give Pettersson the extension he was asking for, signing him to an eight-year, $11.6 million AAV contract on March 2 that is probably now best described as ‘infamous.’ But before they did that, they seemed to seriously consider trading Pettersson instead, with the most-rumoured destination being far and away the Carolina Hurricanes, and the most-rumoured return piece being far and away Martin Necas.

We’ll probably never know how serious these negotiations got, or how much of them were merely a tactic to get Pettersson to soften on his ask. But there was more than enough smoke there to suggest that a Pettersson-for-Necas swap must have been at least somewhat on the table at some point.

In the end, it probably would have been a more complicated transaction, as the two players held different values at the time. Pettersson and Necas are the same age, with Necas born about two months after Pettersson, and came from the same draft class, with Pettersson picked fifth overall and Necas at 12^th. As of March 24, 2024, Necas had experienced a bit of a breakout campaign with 71 points in 2022-23, but had yet to approach Pettersson’s numbers and was slumping toward a 53-point finish for 2023-24.

That means that, clearly, the Hurricanes would have had to include some extra pieces with Necas. But since that’s more nebulous and difficult to quantify, we’re going to leave it to the side for the purposes of this thought experiment, and simply ask “What if…the Canucks swapped Pettersson for Necas back in March 2024?”

At first blush, it’s tempting to say that the Canucks would be a lot happier today. Just on production alone, early 2024 happened to be the point at which Pettersson’s career began to sharply decline, and was just ahead of Necas’ own ascension.

Since then, the numbers are quite stark. Since the day he signed than extension on March 1, Pettersson has scored just 110 points in 158 games. Necas, meanwhile, has 194 points in 179 games across the same span (plus 27 points in 31 playoff games.) That includes a 100-point season last year.

Necas is not a perfect asset. He’s been criticized before for inconsistent play, and an occasionally lacklustre defensive effort. Often stylized as a centre, Necas plays almost exclusively on the wing these days – Nathan MacKinnon’s wing, no less. And eventually, he came with his own massive extension, an eight-year, $11.5 million AAV deal signed in October 2025, and that will take him until the age of 35.

But those are pretty minor issues when the only standard we’re holding Necas up against here is a diminished Elias Pettersson. Necas is head-and-shoulders the better asset as of today, and if that’s all we were here to determine, this article would be done.

But the game of What If… is a little more complicated than that. Right off the bat, it’s worth noting that Necas’ extension didn’t come with the Hurricanes. It came with the Colorado Avalanche, after Necas (and Jack Drury and two picks) had been swapped for pending UFA Mikko Rantanen. It’s possible, then, that Necas would not have signed with the Canucks after being traded for Pettersson, and may have turned into a flipped asset instead.

Which means we’ve got to figure out exactly where the Canucks themselves would be if they made this trade. The Canucks were well in a playoff position as of March 2024. They’d ultimately fall in six games to the Edmonton Oilers in Round Two. The first step of figuring out these full Necas implications is considering whether or not his presence would have been enough to push the Canucks all the way to Round Three.

Back in the real timeline, Pettersson didn’t help all that much with a goal and two assists against the Oilers. Necas, for what it’s worth, put up nine points in 11 postseason games for the Hurricanes that year. Given how close the series was, it’s tempting to think he would have been a difference-maker.

But replacing Pettersson with Necas in that 2023-24 lineup would have meant that either Necas played the postseason at centre, a position he’s not very suited for, or necessitated the Canucks playing Pius Suter as their full-time playoff 2C.

We think it’s probably fairest to say that, in most scenarios with or without Necas, the Canucks don’t make it past the Oilers all the same.

That would still leave the Canucks in more-or-less the same position they ended up in: heading into 2024-25 with some high hopes of continuing their upward trend. Obviously, things went the opposite way, with 2024-25 now remembered by most as the year that everything fell apart.

This is where it gets really interesting, though, because so much of that falling apart centred around the conflict between Pettersson and JT Miller. We’re not here to assign blame to either party at this time, but the issue was clearly personal enough that it’s valid to wonder: had Pettersson been traded in March 2024, would Miller have stayed in Vancouver longer? And the answer to that is ‘probably.’

Where does that put the Canucks for the next season? The holes in the roster were, in retrospect, quite large, but is swapping Necas in for Pettersson enough to change the end result? Necas had 83 points in 2024-25 to Pettersson’s 45, so there would have been some improvement, and maybe we can assume a better season out of at least Miller without all the distraction.

In the end, the Canucks only missed the playoffs that year by six points. There’s really no reason to think they couldn’t have closed that gap with a more productive player and some more peaceful circumstances.

What’s hard to believe, though, is that the Canucks would have made it particularly far in those 2025 playoffs, or that they’d be in a better spot today as a result of making them.

The 2025-26 campaign was still coming all the same. And if Necas were still in the fold at that point, the Canucks would be heading into the year in the awkward spot of negotiating a long-term extension with him, all the while the Quinn Hughes issue loomed over their head.

At this point, we feel fairly confident stating that Hughes was never realistically going to stay in Vancouver beyond his current contract.

And so, the Canucks might find themselves in pretty much the same spot they got to as of the Hughes trade in January of 2026, but with a freshly-signed Necas and a freshly-declined Miller (who only scored 53 points for the Rangers last year) still on the roster instead of Pettersson.

Would the Canucks still be as ready and willing to commit to the rebuild in that scenario? That seems a lot more doubtful. Instead, we might see a scenario in which the team uses the Hughes trade to attempt to return more developed players to build around this Miller/Necas core, and we can all probably agree that’s a path doomed to failure.

If we could get the Canucks to the point they’re currently at, and have swapped Pettersson for Necas along the way, that’d be of benefit to the Canucks, if only for the fact that they could subsequently ship out Necas for a far greater futures-based return than they could currently get for Pettersson.

But it seems more likely that the actual end result would have been a more muddled and far less clean journey toward a new beginning, and probably leaves them in a worse spot overall. For all that’s happened, the Miller and Hughes exits combined with Pettersson’s decline almost forced the Canucks into a rebuild they might otherwise have resisted.

Trading for Necas would have made a difference, no doubt. But perhaps not as positive a difference as the difference in production between he and Pettersson might suggest.