Canucks Live: Hughes hangover, new player sparks, reunion with J.T. Miller

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Nice quiet weekend, anything happen in Canuckworld over the weekend? We always knew the Canucks would bury a trade getting rid of one of their Mount Rushmore worthy players on a Friday night with Christmas parties and weather stories offering a distraction. The fact is we won’t know for a season or two how this trade really worked out, but Quinn Hughes is gone and the Canucks were the worst team in the NHL with him, we wait now to see what they are without him.

The initial returns were good, with Vancouver beating New Jersey largely down to a jolt from the additions. This often happens with players when they’re traded, you see an immediate spike (does not apply to Lukas Reichel), but can it continue? Ben Kuzma’s post game report card was offering encouraging words for the new look Canucks.

Zeev Buium, who turned 20 last week, built a strong foundation by capturing world championship gold with the U.S. last May and a world junior title, put up 48 points in 41 games (13-35) in his final NCAA season at Denver, and has logged 32 games this NHL season.

And in a Sunday matinee at New Jersey, the highly-touted trade acquisition drew the second assist on Jake DeBrusk’s opening power-play goal just 61 seconds into the game. He then had his cross-ice power play feed from the slot to the far post go into the net off defenceman Brenden Dillon. A goal and a helper in the opening 6:48 of a 2-1 matinee victory over the Devils to open a tough five-game road trip.

Marco Rossi (C+): Smart. Shifty. Read game well. Grade A wrister off post. Won 60 per cent of draws.

Liam Ohgren (C): Big body willing to battle, win board battles off end wall, get to the net.

Zeev Buium (B): Quite the debut for rookie rearguard. Poised. Comfortable. Smart. Two points. 

The axiom with most trades, especially ones that involve one big star for several pieces back, is the team who gets the best player wins the trade. But the Canucks were so bereft of talent, giving up the best defenceman they’ve ever had for three quality starters and a first-round pick could be the kind of course correction that lifts them from the depths of the NHL.

On the other side of the ledger, Hughes got off to a great start in Minnesota scoring in his debut.

“It’s been a whirlwind for sure. I’m just looking forward to kind of getting my feet on the ground and get with the team here and get in a day-to-day lifestyle here,” he said after scoring once in Sunday’s 6-2 win over Boston. “The last 48 hours have been a lot, but I was excited to go play the game.”

The comments were his first since Hughes was acquired in a blockbuster trade with Vancouver on Friday. The Wild gave up three former first-round picks — Marco Rossi, Zeev Buium and Liam Ohgren — and a 2026 first-round pick to acquire one of the league’s top blueliners.

“It felt a little bit like we had a little more swagger out there today,” goalie Filip Gustavsson said.

Wild coach John Hynes noted Hughes didn’t get as much as a pre-game skate before playing for real with his new teammates. Puck drop was 5 p.m. local time.

“Overall, I thought it was exciting to have him, and obviously you see the type of player he is. I think he fits in well with our group and the way that we wanna play,” Hynes said.

Hughes received rousing ovations when he hit the ice for warm-ups and when he was the last player to leave the frozen surface.

“I wasn’t expecting that. But that was very cool. I know it’s a hockey market but that was exciting,” Hughes said. 

ESPN’s hockey desk graded the trade in true knee-jerk fashion, they like it for both teams.

Canucks grade: A
Going from being a game away from the Western Conference finals in 2024 to potentially winning the lottery over a two-year period prompted some difficult questions in Vancouver.

Figuring out whether the franchise needed to move on from Hughes might have been the most difficult.

Speculation about Hughes’ future ramped up significantly this off-season, when team president Jim Rutherford said that Hughes wanted to play with his brothers, Jack and Luke, who are on the New Jersey Devils.

Eventually, the Canucks were playing out two hypotheticals: one in which they kept Hughes, attempted to turn things around but ran the risk of losing him in free agency with nothing in return at the end of the 2026-27 season, and another in which they moved on from him at some point, commanding the sort of trade package that could help them now and in the future.

They went with the second option, which has a chance to potentially start paying dividends now for a franchise that entered Friday with the worst record in the NHL — but that is also the owner of two first-round picks in this summer’s draft.

Buium projects as a top-pairing, puck-moving defenceman who could be used in various situations. He joins a top four that includes Filip Hronek, Marcus Pettersson and Tyler Myers. He gives the Canucks another young defenceman for the future, in a young group that also includes Elias Pettersson and Tom Willander. He’s in the second year of his entry-level contract and will become a restricted free agent at the end of the 2026-27 season.

Ohgren is a potential top-nine option who has shown promise with what he has done at the AHL level. By skating more minutes with the Canucks, he could possibly find offensive consistency. He has two years remaining before becoming an RFA.

Rossi has a chance to establish himself as the Canucks’ second-line centre upon his return from injury. Trading J.T. Miller last season created a void that was slated to be filled by a player who came over in that deal, Filip Chytil.

Rossi, who is in the first year of a three-year bridge deal, provides the Canucks with another top-six option down the middle. 

Wild grade: A-
In recent years, the Wild built one of the best farm systems in the NHL. Investing in their system and in player development gave them options … and they used three of those options to land one of the NHL’s best defencemen.

Hughes gives the Wild a Norris Trophy winner who can be used in every situation, starting with the offensive zone. Finding ways to consistently score goals has been a challenge for the Wild over the past few seasons.

Not that Hughes can single-handedly solve for that one problem. But he can definitely help, considering he has had four straight seasons of more than 60 assists and is projected to finish with 56 having missed a portion of this season with an injury.

Of course, adding Hughes came with a premium package going the other way. Buium was in his first full NHL season, having been a first-round pick in 2024. Ohgren was a first-round pick in 2022, and Rossi was a first-round pick in 2020.

The thought was that Buium would be part of the long-term plan, whereas Ohgren was a bit more of a work in progress given he had spent part of the season in the AHL. Rossi re-signed with the Wild having just spent the 2024-25 season and the early portion of the off-season as a possible trade target before agreeing to that new deal.

Parlaying a sizable part of their future to get Hughes signals that the Wild are intent on breaking into that collection of teams that are in a championship window. Two of them — the Colorado Avalanche and the Dallas Stars — are ahead of the Wild in the Central Division standings right now.

Hughes has one more year left on his current contract at $7.85 million before hitting free agency in the summer of 2027, but he can sign an extension as of July 1, 2026. Whatever happens between now and then could play a role in defining one of the biggest trades in Wild franchise history.

The Athletic had a similar take, suggesting this is a deal that works for both sides.

The Hughes deal works for both teams — The Canucks did as well as they could have hoped, and maybe a bit better. You can certainly criticize all the steps and missteps that got them to a place where they felt they had to move Hughes, but once they arrived here, they played it reasonably well.

That doesn’t mean it’s an overpay by the Wild by any stretch, at least assuming that Hughes will give them a fair chance at extending him. And remember, if worst comes to worst and the Wild can’t get an extension done, they could always move Hughes at next year’s deadline.

Is Hughes the best young player to be traded in the cap era? — I think there’s a legitimate argument. Hughes just turned 26 and already has a Norris Trophy. He’s roughly the same age as Joe Thornton was when he went to the Sharks, and he’d had a 100-point season but didn’t become a truly elite star until he got to San Jose. P.K. Subban had a Norris when he went from Montreal to Nashville. Names like Matthew Tkachuk, Mikko Rantanen, Jack Eichel and Tyler Seguin are in the conversation.

Maybe the best comparison for Hughes is one that Wild fans might not love: Erik Karlsson, who was 28 and had two Norris wins when he went to San Jose in a trade that didn’t work out as well as Sharks fans would have hoped. But yeah, Hughes might be a bigger star right now than any of those guys.

While they like the trade it didn’t move the Canucks out of the basement of their bottom five teams.

1. Vancouver Canucks (12-17-3, -25) — The Hughes trade would seem to signal that management is giving up on the season and focusing on the future, which is of course the right call. Still, Zeev Buium looked pretty good in his debut.

The Athletic’s Thomas Drance also explored how this trade reshapes the Vancouver Canucks

The Canucks no longer have Hughes, so this trade fundamentally alters the organization. Hughes was the best defender in franchise history, and his loss will have an incalculable impact on this team. It effectively launched the Canucks into at least a short-term rebuilding mode. Considering they rank 32nd in the NHL by point percentage, they were arguably there already, but now they’ll pursue that end with more intentionality and purpose. 

It has to hurt for Canucks fans to think how close they were to beating the Oilers taking them to a Game 7 just two seasons ago. Now Hughes is gone and the team seems as far away from the Stanley Cup as they’ve ever been. The shape started shifting last season with the soap opera between Elias Pettersson and J.T. Miller who was traded to the Rangers. He’d got off to an awful start with the Blueshirts this season but has picked it up lately, scoring twice on the weekend to beat Montreal. He limped out of practice on Sunday so unclear if he’ll be fit to face Vancouver on Tuesday, but he seems to be looking more lately like the J.T. Miller who was a Canuck cornerstone an saw the fans chanting his name at Rogers Arena.

“It’s basically how I evaluate myself: Are you driving the play or not? Or are you just out there?” Miller said. “I was just kind of wasting energy, it felt like. I couldn’t get into rhythm and timing.”

It amplified questions about the wisdom of committing to a volatile 32-year-old who’s been traded three times — including once previously from New York — but Miller has been on a noticeable upswing of late.

After registering only nine points through his first 20 games, he’s matched that total with a point-per-game pace in his last nine contests. Still, Miller pushed back on the notion that his improvement started around that marker, saying, “I don’t even think it’s the last (nine games). I might have had points in those games, but I wasn’t driving play.”

In his mind, the turnaround began just last week. His coach, Mike Sullivan, fully concurred.

“J.T.’s last few games are among his best that he’s had all year long,” Sullivan said. “There were a few instances where you’re watching from the bench, and the feeling I get is that, ‘He’s in a beast mode.’ When he’s possessing the puck in the offensive zone, using his size and his physical stature to protect pucks and roll off the pressure and look for that next play, he’s hard to handle.” 

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