Drance ranks Canucks players by trade market value entering 2026

Not going to copy-paste entire article(he ranks 26 players) but here are some that stand out.

1. Filip Hronek

Hronek is a very good player in his late 20s on a reasonable contract who plays a premium position. He’s a productive, skilled top-pair defender capable of playing in all situations and holding up in tough minutes. Right-handed top-pair calibre defenders with real two-way value are in short supply around the league, and contender-level (or aspiring contender-level) teams would value that highly if Vancouver were ever to make Hronek available.

Complicating Hronek’s trade value, however, is his full no-move clause. The veteran blueliner, by all accounts, is settled and content in Vancouver and wants to remain with the franchise. If he were to ever move, you can bet the list of teams he’d be willing to consider being dealt to would be very short, making it far more difficult for Vancouver to return the sort of value Hronek’s calibre of a player would otherwise dictate.

Buium and Willander listed at 2 and 3 respectively but that's just for filling the word count.

4 Kiefer Sherwood

Sherwood is the sort of trade asset teams very rarely possess. He’s the sort of player that would make sense for 31 NHL teams to add, and even more unusually, because of his affordable $1.5 million expiring cap hit, all 31 NHL teams could very easily figure out how to add him in a trade.

Sherwood’s combination of playoff-ready toughness, one-shot scoring ability and affordability — and Vancouver could juice his value even further by retaining half of his cap hit, placing his cap hit well below the veteran minimum for an acquiring team — makes him an extremely valuable trade chip. That he would make sense for both teams that are ascending and in need of some doggedness, skill and experience (with the club perhaps allowing that team to negotiate an extension with Sherwood, further increasing the potential return) and for win-now contenders that wouldn’t plan to re-sign him but would love to add him for a playoff run should only further enhance his trade value.

5 Thatcher Demko

The Canucks have no plans to trade Demko, but there’s an argument to be made that he’s an awkward fit for a team in Vancouver’s position.

As an asset, Demko combines a sky-high ceiling as a Vezina-calibre goaltender when he’s healthy and an exceptionally low floor because of his checkered injury history. For a team that should be rebuilding like Vancouver (or “hybrid retooling,” whatever), Vancouver isn’t well-positioned to benefit from that ceiling — if Demko is at his absolute best in the first few years of his next deal, maybe the Canucks sneak into the playoffs and sewer their draft lottery odds. Given that, Vancouver isn’t at a stage where they can afford to sit on an asset of Demko’s quality in the event that he sustains another injury and depreciates significantly.

Whatever we might think of the shape of this, a high-ceiling, low-floor player at such a valuable position is something a fringe top-10 NHL team would likely be willing to take a big, risky swing at on the trade market — and pay a solid price for the right to do so.

6 Jake DeBrusk tl;dr: Late 20s forward with most value. Elite skater, clutch in playoffs.

7 Elias Pettersson

Pettersson’s trade value is just about impossible to rank or gauge.

Some teams would have zero interest, and there are teams that would probably still view him as a high-end reclamation project at a premium position. Those teams would likely be willing to part with some level of assets to add him to their lineup at the full freight of his long-term $11.6 million AAV contract.

As good as Pettersson has been, and he’s spent years as a superstar-level contributor, the recent track record would be heavily weighted by acquiring teams. Throw in the off-ice drama that has surrounded Pettersson over the past 18 months, the increasingly checkered injury history and an 18-month run during which he’s struggled to make the sort of high-end impact we came to expect from Pettersson earlier on in his career, and his value would really be determined on a team-by-team basis. It would also be far lower than something Vancouver is likely to consider.

For the purpose of our rankings, Pettersson is the ultimate polarized value asset. Some teams might view him as a potential Jack Eichel-like buy-low opportunity and would accordingly pay for the opportunity to try to realize that upside. Other teams, however, would surely view him as being a closer comparable to Patrik Laine and have little interest at all in rolling the dice regardless of the acquisition cost.

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6915875/2025/12/26/vancouver-canucks-trade-tiers-2026/