It doesn’t take much to cause concern among Vancouver Canucks fans.

Case in point: Thomas Drance’s report in The Athletic that the Canucks might be “open” to trading their surplus of second and third-round picks for young players.

The report was carefully couched in cautious words — it’s not like the Canucks have any actual trades on the table — but it’s understandable that Canucks fans might be a bit triggered after years of management sending away draft capital and prospects looking for shortcuts with “age gap” trades.

There’s an appetite in Vancouver for a long-term plan after short-term thinking has repeatedly resulted in long offseasons for the Canucks. The last thing fans want to hear is that the Canucks are considering trading away picks.

To be fair, the Canucks’ management wouldn’t be doing their jobs if they didn’t kick tires on various reclamation projects or disgruntled youngsters around the league. You have to do your due diligence because you never know when an offer-you-can’t-refuse type of deal might become available.

But, generally speaking, this is not the time to be trading picks for players.

The Canucks are at the very beginning of their rebuild. They’re barely out of the prologue and just beginning chapter one. This is the stage where they need to add more draft picks, not trade them away.

It’s easy to point out the low odds of a draft pick making the NHL — around 25% of second-round picks play 300+ NHL games, and just 17% of third-round picks — and use that as justification for trading those picks for more of a sure thing.

Except those sure things aren’t always so sure. The upside of “young players with upside” isn’t always as “up” as one might hope, as Canucks fans have seen several times over. After all, as much as most second and third-round picks don’t play 300+ games, neither did Linden Vey and Sven Baertschi.

But rather than relitigating the mistakes of the past, it’s worth looking at how those types of trades might affect the future. Because what the Canucks need in the future isn’t just NHL players, but impact players.

While the odds of finding an NHL player in the second or third rounds of the draft might be relatively low, you might be more likely to find an impact player in those rounds than by using those draft picks in a trade. After all, there’s typically a reason why a team is willing to trade a young player — someone who they know well and have spent significant time developing — and there’s a reason why reclamation projects are in need of reclaiming.

Consider the Montreal Canadiens, who have swiftly become the very model of a modern NHL rebuild.

One of the key pieces of that rebuild has been Lane Hutson, who averages over 23 minutes per game, quarterbacks the Montreal first power play unit, and has 76 points through 80 games this season.

Hutson was a second-round pick in 2022.

But the point isn’t that the Canadiens found a star player in the second round and the Canucks should endeavour to do the same. Of course, the Canucks should look for star players outside the first round of the draft. That goes without saying.

The point is that Hutson wasn’t just a second-round pick; he was the second of two second-round picks for the Canadiens in 2022.

Hutson was overlooked for his size at 5’9”, and so slid down the draft to 62nd overall. Since the Canadiens had a surplus of picks, they could afford to use one of those extra picks to take a chance on Hutson.

And Hutson isn’t the only impactful player the Canadiens grabbed with an extra second-round pick. Oliver Kapanen was the second of two second-round picks in 2021; now he’s the Canadiens’ second-line centre and has scored 22 goals this season.

While the Canadiens clearly scouted and drafted well, the quantity of picks clearly helped: without the extra picks in the second round, they would have missed out on both Hutson and Kapanen.

Using their extra picks has also helped the Canadiens on the trade market more than simply trading those picks when they were just picks.

Alexander Romanov was the second of three second-round picks in 2018, and the Canadiens were able to trade him for a first-round pick from the New York Islanders. Jordan Harris was the second of two third-round picks in 2018, and he netted them Patrik Laine (shame about the injuries) and a second-round pick in a trade with the Columbus Blue Jackets.

Even Adam Engstrom is worth mentioning here. He was the second of two third-round picks for the Canadiens in 2022 and is currently a top-pairing defenceman for the Laval Rocket in the AHL, with the potential to break through to the NHL in the near future.

The draft is often a crapshoot, especially outside of the first round or even the top ten. But that doesn’t mean the Canucks shouldn’t play the game; it means the Canucks need more rolls of the dice.

The Canucks have made multiple second-round picks in a draft just once since 2002. Is it any wonder they’ve frequently had a shallow prospect pool?

Now, the Canucks have two second-round picks in this year’s draft, three second-round picks in 2027, and two second-round picks in 2028.

They should use them.