December 17th, 2025
Jaden Teja
There are many words to describe the Quinn Hughes trade for the Vancouver Canucks, but the most common one is failure, and it absolutely is. The Canucks had the best defenseman in franchise history in his prime and failed to build around him. Quinn Hughes is the greatest defenseman we’ll ever see in a Canuck jersey. I don’t care how the rest of the trade works out.
The greatest thing that happened to this franchise is when Steve Yzerman walked up to the podium at the 2018 NHL Draft and announced that the Detroit Red Wings would be picking Filip Zadina, gifting the Vancouver Canucks Quinn Hughes. So what did they do with the most dynamic and valuable player to this franchise? Yeah, I said it, Quinn Hughes is the most valuable player in franchise history, more than Pavel Bure, more than the Sedins, more than Markus Näslund. No Canuck was more valuable to his team than Hughes was, and they just threw it away.
They were forced into shipping off Hughes two years removed from winning a Norris Trophy, and I’m sure it won’t be his only one. When you look at it, do you blame Hughes for wanting out? He gave this franchise everything he possibly could for seven years. From his first game in the NHL against the Los Angeles Kings, when he skated around the Kings and banked the puck behind the net to himself, and Brock Boeser put the rebound in, Canucks fans knew we had something special brewing, and we did.
But all it amounted to was two second-round Game 7 exits over the course of his career in Vancouver. All of those ankle-breaking plays at the blue line, those end-to-end rushes, and those crisp tape-to-tape passes all meant nothing because we couldn’t win. All Quinn talked about was winning; all he wanted to do was help this team win. But unfortunately, management and ownership failed him.
The Canucks had an amazing young core of Quinn Hughes, Brock Boeser, Elias Pettersson, and Thatcher Demko, and they just completely threw it away. Not even two years ago, we were a game, one goal away from the Western Conference Final, and now we are in the position of hoping for draft lottery luck… once again.
All we want is for hockey to be fun in this city again. Don’t you remember how much fun and how great the vibes were around this team in 2024? Vancouver deserves a great hockey team, and Hughes was the leader. He was the one who was supposed to lift the Cup over his head. Not to sound cliché, but he was supposed to have a statue outside of Rogers Arena. It is absolutely pitiful that he never got that chance.
Say whatever you want about the last two weeks of his tenure in Vancouver, there should be no Hughes hate. Hughes is a generational defenseman, the type of player that doesn’t come around very often, and that’s what makes this even more heartbreaking. Hughes is a player who goes first overall in almost every draft class, and the Canucks miraculously got him at seven and did absolutely nothing.
It’s a damn shame. It’s a damn shame.
Trading Hughes symbolizes the mediocrity this team has been stuck in over the last decade plus. All I want to see is the Canucks win a Stanley Cup, and this was the core that was supposed to do it. We had a franchise centre, a franchise defenseman, and a franchise goalie, the three pillars of building a Cup-winning team and did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
You don’t let a talent like Hughes walk out the door. You do whatever it takes to keep him. Unfortunately, when you take on terrible contracts like Oliver Ekman-Larsson, it’s hard to add other quality players to your roster. If fans are fed up with the losing this team has endured, don’t you think the players are too? Especially a player who plays almost 30 minutes a night and lays his body on the line just to try and scrape and claw his team into the playoffs each year.
Be honest, if you were in Hughes’s position, you would have left too.
I’ll say it again, it’s a damn shame and a straight-up failure that it came down to trading Hughes to try and rebuild this team. Unfortunately, of all the great memories people have of Hughes in a Canucks jersey, very few, if any, are of him playing meaningful hockey.
It pains me that we’ll never see Hughes play hockey for the Canucks again, and it will forever sting that the reason is that we couldn’t build around a franchise defenseman. I think the perfect way to sum up the Hughes era in Vancouver is a line from Green Day’s Good Riddance:
“For what it’s worth, it was worth all the while.”