The Minnesota Wild decided to shock the hockey world by acquiring world-class defenseman Quinn Hughes from the Vancouver Canucks on Friday night and the package they had to send makes it completely clear that the Philadelphia Flyers never really had a chance to get the player.
Wild general manager Bill Guerin sent hotshot rookie defenseman Zeev Buium (we’re all familiar with him), center Marco Rossi, winger Liam Ohgren, and a 2026 first-round pick off to Vancouver to get Hughes on his team for roughly 18 months. It is basically a collection of three high-end young players who were all taken recent first rounds — three players who all found themselves on top prospect lists around the internet and sometimes even topping them. It was a move that removed a giant chunk of a team’s future to go all-in with one of the best defensemen the sport has seen this century.
To shift it now to the Flyers, it would’ve been a much more complicated move that would’ve meant a lot more uncertainty with who they would be giving up and what future they would have hold. While the Flyers were in the conversation to be a potential landing spot for Hughes, now we see that it never was a true possibility.
If we want to conjure up some value-for-value, player-for-player comparison, it certainly seems like the logical collection of players would’ve been something like Porter Martone, Tyson Foerster, Jett Luchanko, and that same first-round pick.
Martone would match the Buium-level hype of a player dominating college and the team’s top prospect; Foerster would be Rossi in this scenario, as the current NHL player who is responsible in both ends of the ice and while not being a center, certainly possesses the same attributes as the young Austrian; and then Luchanko matches Ohgren by being a former first-round pick but doesn’t have the same ceiling as the other two players. It really does feel like as close a comparison as we could make up in our hockey-burdened minds.
So, would the Flyers even make this deal right now? Probably not.
Not the right time for the Flyers to make such a trade
Even if we could figure out a very strict comparison in value, it doesn’t mean that the Flyers could viably make this sort of move. It would be essentially committing to this current version of the team and deciding that the young players and prospects they currently have are enough for the time being. Getting rid of a large part of their potential future core to go forward with Hughes on their blue line and the future much more limited.
Where the Flyers are in their current rebuilding plans, they’re still looking to gather all the pieces for this hypothetical consistent contender. Martone and Foerster are certainly two wingers who would be at the top of the lineup in this plan — so immediately the Flyers would be cutting that out to make this pushing-the-chips-in trade.
And just to make it clear, Hughes would instantly make this team a real threat to not only make the playoffs but at least be a tough out and even win a round or two as an underdog. It would’ve made the next two seasons (and the next two if Hughes were to re-sign) probably involve better Flyers teams, but the messaging coming from this front office has always been about patience. And something just tells me that to trade away three players that could’ve carved out decade-long careers in Philadelphia, to try and see the potential ceiling of this current roster, wouldn’t have been the realistic move.
Maybe when Matvei Michkov is Kirill Kaprizov’s age and the Flyers do have him and Martone blossoming into two of the best wingers in the NHL (we can dream) as other key young players fill up the lineup, the Flyers can hope for another massive talent to come across the trade market — and that would make a whole lot more sense.
Is that likely? Not really. Quinn Hughes is a one-of-a-kind talent and it also would’ve made sense if general manager Danny Briere thought of this as an extremely rare opportunity to get a future Hall-of-Famer at such a young age.
We can always go back and forth about whether or not the Flyers should have made this kind of deal (and without an NHL center in the package the Canucks might have not even accepted that) but for the time being, they are sticking to their plan and not trying to accelerate anything. They general sentiment certainly feels like they are going to organically grow this team into the contender they want, rather than synthetically pump this roster full of short-term solutions.