Canucks’ 2025 NHL Draft Lottery odds, and the Quinn Hughes pressure point

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As any VIP will tell you, the NHL Draft Lottery has never once smiled upon the Vancouver Canucks.

With the 2025 lottery set to take place on Monday evening, it’s worth recalling this sordid history. The Canucks are one of only eight NHL teams to never make a selection with the first pick at the draft, and most of the other eight teams — like the Seattle Kraken, Nashville Predators and Vegas Golden Knights — are relatively recent expansion franchises.

At times, the Canucks’ lack of lottery luck has reached almost comical proportions. During the 1970 expansion process that birthed the franchise 55 years ago, for example, the Canucks lost all three relevant lotteries against their expansion cousins the Buffalo Sabres (the first was for waiver priority, the second was for the first pick in the 1970 expansion draft and the third was for the first pick in the 1970 NHL Entry Draft and the right to select Gilbert Perreault).

During the unintentional tanking seasons that characterized the Jim Benning era, the Canucks regularly fell as far as it was mathematically possible to fall the draft order. Draft lottery disappointment became something like a rite of spring for Canucks fans during the darkest years of the post-Sedin era.

This year, the Canucks’ lack of lottery luck is overwhelmingly likely to continue. At least on this occasion, the stakes will be relatively low.

The lottery no longer gives every non-playoff team an opportunity to select first. For the Canucks, who will have the 15th best odds, a lottery win would mean jumping up a maximum of 10 spots to the fifth selection in the 2025 NHL Draft.

Even those odds are incredibly long. Vancouver is roughly 98 percent likely to remain locked in at the 15th pick, with a 1 percent shot of launching into the top 10 and a 1 percent shot of falling one place to the 16th pick.

This year’s draft lottery, however, is still worth monitoring for Canucks fans. While Vancouver can only jump up to the fifth selection, the general scouting consensus among amateur talent evaluators appears to be that there’s a consensus top six group of players — presumptive No. 1 pick Matthew Schaefer, followed by Michael Misa, Porter Martone, James Hagens and then a pair of highly regarded centres in Caleb Desnoyers and Anton Frondell — and something of a perceived tier drop thereafter.

It might not be the top pick, but if Vancouver could hit an uncharacteristic spot of lottery luck on Monday that rocketed them up the draft order, it would still represent a game-changing development for the Canucks. Especially given Vancouver’s pressing need for elite talent and elite centre talent in particular.

It would also substantially impact the probability of Canucks management actually using their 2025 first-round pick to draft a player, as opposed to shopping it on the trade market for the purpose of landing the top-six centre the club urgently requires in the here and now.

The first-round pick and the all-in summer

As we’ve reported at length in this space over the past several months, Canucks hockey operations leadership views this upcoming summer as an all-in offseason.

The Canucks believe that they can get back to contending as soon as next season. They’re willing to consider all of their options (or nearly all of their options) in attempting to bring that about.

And that includes trading the 2025 first-round pick.

“This coming year is critical, so we’ll keep an open mind as to what it takes to improve our team,” said Canucks president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford on the 100% Hockey podcast late last week. “We’ll consider moving our first pick if it’s for a player that’s going to make a difference on our team.”

The club’s thinking on utilizing the 2025 first-round pick as trade bait to upgrade the top-six forward group would be significantly impacted in the unlikely event of a lottery win. If Vancouver’s first-rounder lands in the top five, the Canucks would be, understandably, more likely to stick and pick than they would be if they remain in the middle of the draft order.

As a result of aggressive trades to bolster the roster for the short-term (like renting Tyler Toffoli and Elias Lindholm), or in order to shed onerous salary commitments (like in the Jason Dickinson trade or the Oliver Ekman-Larsson blockbuster), the Canucks have only selected in the first or second round three times since 2020.

The club has still managed to build out its prospect pipeline somewhat under new management, but it’s required extraordinary amateur scouting efficiency to identify players like Elias Pettersson (the defender), Sawyer Mynio and Kirill Kudrayvtsev — in addition to marketable assets like Hunter Brzustewicz — outside of the top-64 picks.

Given the club’s relative success in this area during Rutherford and general manager Patrik Allvin’s tenures, one wonders what the Canucks and their amateur scouting staffs might achieve with the wind at their backs and real draft capital to utilize in strengthening this club for the long-term.

Alas, short of a lucky bounce from the lottery balls on Monday, it’s highly possible that we won’t find out this spring.

A surprise untouchable

If the Canucks are going to land the sort of upgrade they need in their top-six forward group, it’s more than likely to be accompanied by significant pain.

Difference-making top-six centres are nearly impossible to acquire. High-scoring wingers are somewhat more readily available, but are still exorbitantly expensive to trade for.

If the Canucks, who clearly don’t expect to be players for the top unrestricted free agent talent this summer, are going to address their shortfall in the skilled forward department this offseason, they’re going to have to pay retail price.

This is something that Canucks hockey operations leadership is aware of, and is already in the process of planning for.

The club doesn’t want to trade its 2025 first-round pick, for example, but is aware that it might be the cost of doing business.

Vancouver also doesn’t want to trade away any of its top prospects or good young NHL-level contributors, but is aware that it might be the cost of doing business.

The Canucks don’t want to trade goaltender Thatcher Demko. In fact, they would prefer to work through the parameters of extending their star goaltender this summer despite the difficult year he endured from an injury perspective. But it’s fair to wonder if even that could end up being the cost of doing business.

One Canucks player, however, that the club has essentially taken off the table as trade fodder already in sketching out their offseason plans, is Pettersson, the young defender colloquially referred to as “Junior” by the organization.

Pettersson, who the club tellingly didn’t paper down to join the Abbotsford Canucks for their Calder Cup playoff run, looms large in the club’s offseason planning process.

He’s a fixed point at this juncture, a player that the Canucks intend to continue to build their defence corps around for years to come.

It’s not just the skill set that Pettersson demonstrated in both the AHL and NHL this season, although that’s a major part of it. The club is enamoured by Pettersson’s physical traits, including his toughness and deceptive speed. There’s even a sense internally that he was unlucky not to produce more offence given how well developed his instincts for jumping into the play appear to be at this precocious stage in his career.

Even beyond that, though, there’s a certain authority, maturity and work ethic off the ice that has cemented Pettersson as a core organizational piece. Given the difficulty the organization worked through this past season from a cultural perspective, Pettersson’s value in this area shouldn’t be underestimated.

While the club sees Pettersson as a player with a chance to be special, it’s every bit as important that the young Canucks defender has already come to be viewed internally as the sort of person that the club needs to build around.

Quinn Hughes has two seasons remaining on his current contract. (Elsa / Getty Images)

How to think about the Quinn Hughes dynamic

Quinn Hughes’ Canucks future is the talk of the NHL at the moment.

Ever since Rutherford explicitly broached the subject in his year-end news conference, and accelerating with Rick Tocchet’s departure last week, speculation around Hughes has dominated the conversation around this team both locally and nationally.

Takes have poured in on what the club should do, while various outlets have speculated on what a trade with the New Jersey Devils could look like.

New York Post columnist Larry Brooks, for example, wrote a quick missive last week suggesting that the Canucks and the Devils have every incentive to get a deal done early. Rutherford, meanwhile, characterized his club on the 100% Hockey podcast as having at least another season and change of team control before the matter of Hughes’ future would be more pressing.

“We control him for a year and two-thirds because if we get to that trade deadline two years from now and it looks like he doesn’t want to stay, then we would have to do something,” said Rutherford.

With so much noise around this situation over the past week, I figured it would be worthwhile to lay out how we should be thinking about and forecasting this situation.

Now, obviously, we don’t know Hughes’ mind. We have no indication of how he’s personally thinking about his Canucks future or his long-term career decisions two years out from unrestricted free agency.

If, for the purposes of this exercise, we assume that Hughes would be open to staying in Vancouver provided that the team has a realistic shot at contending, then that’s fantastic.

The Canucks should do everything they can to improve the team in the short term, make their captain a mammoth offer on July 1, 2026, when he becomes eligible to sign an extension and go from there. Hopefully, the two sides can reach an agreement, Hughes signs that extension, and the best defender in franchise history is locked up until his mid-30s on a record-setting contract sure to be the biggest in franchise history.

If Hughes is open to staying in Vancouver long-term, then this is relatively straightforward. The club would have incentives to improve in the short term this offseason, and we’d look to July 1, 2026, as the most meaningful deadline in this process.

Now let’s flip our assumption. For the second leg of this exercise, let’s assume that Hughes is leery about staying in Vancouver and that the club will be hard pressed to get his autograph on a contract regardless of how successfully it revamps the roster over the course of this summer.

Assuming that Hughes is leery about extending in Vancouver, well, then that would be a very bitter pill to swallow. Given Hughes’ quality as a player and a leader, however, the Canucks should take all of the time that’s available to them to sell the best defender in franchise history on staying in Vancouver.

If, at that point, Hughes remains unwilling to do a deal, or, if he informs the club that he has no intention of signing an extension in Vancouver — as Matthew Tkachuk did in Calgary, Alex DeBrincat did in Ottawa and Pierre-Luc Dubois did in Winnipeg — then the Canucks shouldn’t waste any time (or risk any diminishment in his value due to injury) in maximizing his value on the trade market.

Unless the club is a genuine preseason Stanley Cup favourite, the Canucks should be totally unwilling to enter the 2026-27 campaign, the final season of Hughes’ current contract, without their perennial Norris Trophy defender signed to a long-term extension. The club should, instead, permit Hughes and his camp to drive trade conversations to a team that he’d be willing to sign with long-term, with the extension getting done as part of the trade — thus boosting Vancouver’s compensation in parting with an irreplaceable, franchise-player level asset.

If you’ve missed the point of this exercise, let’s spell it out: regardless of Hughes’ thinking about his long-term future, the Canucks have zero incentive to consider trading him this summer. And, in fact, their rational self-interest is best served by following the same course of action regardless of his plans or private thinking about his playing future.

If Hughes, in his heart of hearts, is open to staying, then great! And if he’s not, then the club should be preparing to take a big swing (or three) to upgrade the roster this summer — both to try to convince him to change his mind, and because, even if that fails, it’s still worth taking one final shot at contending before you lose a transcendent superstar-level player. Especially given that losing Hughes would cause the Canucks to enter a totally new, and probably painful, phase of their team-building cycle.

In any event, the deadline to be mindful of will not be the trade deadline in 2027. If it reaches that point, the club has severely lost the plot.

For the Canucks and Hughes, the pressure point is July 1, 2026.

(Photo of NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly: Mike Stobe / NHLI via Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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