Let’s be clear off the top: a trade by the Vancouver Canucks for Anaheim Ducks restricted free agent Mason McTavish was always highly unlikely.
For a start, the Canucks didn’t really have the trade chips to pull it off: they’d have to give up at least one of their lead prospects and then some and this is a team that needs all the internal pieces it can find.
Second, you need a willing trade partner and although McTavish remains unsigned with training camps opening in just over a week from now, there’s no real indication that the Ducks are looking to move the young centre.
That’s the summation of what Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman told CHEK-TV’s Donnie and Dhali show on Tuesday.
“I think right now, McTavish, I don’t think the Ducks want to trade him,” Friedman said. “I think they want to sign him. I don’t think they want to trade him.”
Although we’re all chattering outside the situation, those inside the story have kept quiet. Agent Pat Morris has not responded to queries about his agent’s status and you know that Pat Verbeek, Anaheim’s GM, is keeping relatively mum as well.
Multiple league sources said they believed that Anaheim were unlikely to trade McTavish.
“They fight with every player on their contract,” one said. Remember, Verbeek held firm in the summer of 2023 in negotiations with Trevor Zegras and Jamie Drysdale; both players didn’t sign three-year deals until the eve of the regular season.
Another source said things seemed dead quiet, betting that in the end the player and team would sign a new deal.
It make sense. McTavish is a restricted free agent, meaning he could sign an offer sheet with another team, but logic alone suggests he’d be unlikely to sign anything but a big offer and a big offer sheet means giving up a lot of top-end draft picks, which most teams are reluctant to part with. Logic further tells us that were he to sign a lower offer, the Ducks would quickly match, because, after all, every team would love to have a good young player on a cheap contract.
That is why some have pondered what a McTavish trade would look like: if you can’t truly sign him to an offer sheet, you’ll have to talk trade with the Ducks. Given McTavish’s talent, size and potential, the Ducks would want a player who can help now, plus a true blue-chip prospect for the future.
And we can look at the Canucks’ roster and say that would be hard to pull off. Jonathan Lekkerimaki, Elias Junior Pettersson and Tom Willander are all fine prospects, but they’re not true blue-chippers. Every team has guys like this, who are likely to settle in somewhere in the middle of a lineup, be the kind of complimentary player every team wants to find and keep the costs on down.
The only real NHL player they could afford to move is Filip Chytil, who they did consider moving in the spring in their efforts to bring in Josh Norris from Ottawa (the Sens ended up moving him to Buffalo for Dylan Cozens after the Canucks failed to come up with a first-round pick they’d have liked to have packaged with Chytil).
Chytil’s a handy player and will help the Canucks — provided he can stay healthy and given his past issues with head injuries, that’s a big bet.