With the end of the flat cap era, the rebuilding path traced by the Utah Mammoth, the Chicago Blackhawks and the Montreal Canadiens in acquiring future assets by getting paid to take on underperforming veterans signed to inefficient contracts has largely dried up.
The days of getting paid a first-round pick to take on Sean Monahan’s contract, rehabilitating his value, and then selling him off for an additional first-round pick (and a conditional mid-rounder to boot) are largely a thing of the past. In the cap growth era, players like Matias Maccelli, Mason Marchment, Phillip Danault, Ivan Fedotov, Dakota Joshua and Evander Kane net their teams a meaningful return, despite inconvenient annual average values and even term remaining on some of those contracts.
In the current NHL climate, the scarce resource management problem that teams have to solve doesn’t exist on a spreadsheet, the way it so often did between 2019 and 2024. Now the scarcest resource in hockey is talent, and there are significant ramifications to that shift for contenders and rebuilding teams alike.
From a Vancouver Canucks perspective, this dynamic shift has arrived at a sensitive time in franchise history. On the one hand, it’s going to make it more difficult to both acquire useful NHL players while also acquiring assets in the same deal — the way the Blackhawks did, for example, in executing a pair of trades with Vancouver for Jason Dickinson and Ilya Mikheyev over the past few years. On the other hand, it means some of Vancouver’s inefficient-seeming contracts for underperforming veteran players aren’t likely to prove to be the sort of immovable millstones that they might’ve been in the flat cap environment.
As much as the cap growth era has taken some of the sting out of targeting teams with distressed assets as a means of both improving your NHL lineup while simultaneously adding future value, there’s still utility to speculating in struggling veteran players on inefficient or inconvenient contracts. Those are still the players, after all, that NHL teams are most likely to be willing to move, even if they no longer have to add assets in order to offload those deals. And acquiring problematic contracts with lesser term than longer-term deals (tied to more useful pieces) that a rebuilding team is sending out is still an avenue to greater flexibility going forward.
With that in mind, here are five such players the Canucks could consider targeting in advance of the NHL trade deadline.
Warren Foegele, Los Angeles Kings
With Artemi Panarin in the fold, the Kings have a serious glut of wingers. By our count, L.A. has 10-12 wingers who are NHL-calibre, which far exceeds the eight in your lineup on any given night. GM Ken Holland was asked on TNT’s broadcast last week whether additional moves would be coming for his team ahead of the deadline, and he specifically mentioned Warren Foegele — who has been a recent healthy scratch — as a piece they’ll try to move.
Foegele is a very intriguing bounce-back candidate. The 29-year-old left winger had an outstanding campaign in 2024-25, where he scored 24 goals and 46 points. That’s especially impressive production because nearly all of it came at even-strength — his 22 five-on-five goals were tied with Alex Tuch, Matthew Knies, Alex DeBrincat, and Connor McMichael for 17th best among all NHL forwards. He hit 20 goals and 41 points the year prior during his final season in Edmonton as well.
Foegele’s offence has crashed to only six goals and two assists in 43 games this season. He isn’t generating shots and scoring chances as prolifically as he was the last two years, but there are also signs that he’s been unlucky. Foegele’s shooting percentage has dipped below 10 percent, and his line has scored on just 5 percent of its five-on-five shots, which is sure to rebound.
The speedy, aggressive forechecking forward also has a stellar defensive profile and is an experienced penalty killer. He’s signed through next season at a $3.5 million cap hit, which means a team like the Canucks could rebuild his value and sell him at next year’s deadline as a rental. We’ve seen run-of-the-mill third-line wingers like Anthony Beauvillier go for second-round picks as deadline rentals as recently as last year, and the Canucks could further juice Foegele’s trade value next year by retaining salary.
Acquiring Foegele would also make it easier for the Canucks to justify selling high on Drew O’Connor at the trade deadline this year. O’Connor is scoring at a near-20-goal clip and would be appealing to teams given his size, speed, and reasonable contract ($2.5 million AAV through next season).
This profiles as an appealing opportunity for the Canucks to explore, but the unknown variable is what the market for Foegele looks like on the Kings’ end. If there’s lukewarm league-wide interest in the player and the Kings are forced to surrender a draft pick to get off the contract, this is a move the Canucks should strongly consider. On the other hand, if there’s enough outside interest in Foegele for him to be a positive-value asset and the Canucks would have to pay a pick to acquire him, then it probably doesn’t make sense.
Ryan Strome, C, Anaheim Ducks
Ryan Strome has been a consistent 40-point centre in each of the past six seasons, but his form has fallen off significantly this year and he’s been passed by a critical mass of young forward talent in the Ducks’ lineup. Bumped off of the Ducks’ first power-play unit, Strome has managed only eight points in 32 games this season. He’s also become a regular healthy scratch.
He’s effectively a thirteenth or fourteenth forward in the Ducks lineup, struggling to get regular minutes even when they’ve been shorthanded due to injury. And he’s got this season and next season remaining on a contract that carries a $5 million cap hit.
Strome is a bona fide, natural centremen who has no form of trade protection and has previously played in Canada (for the Oilers). His lack of trade protection makes him an especially attractive reclamation project for a centre-needy team like the Canucks, given that he’d be relatively easy to flip at the 2026 NHL trade deadline provided that he can retrieve his previous level of effectiveness and production.
While Strome is a flawed player — he’s never been a fast skater, and though his speed has declined somewhat with age, he qualifies as a “can’t lose what you never had” type — he’s a pretty good bet to perform better with a more regular opportunity. His significant offensive struggles this season, for example, appear to be primarily driven by a career low five-on-five shooting percentage, an unsustainably low PDO and a diminishing role on the Ducks’ power play. For a team like the Canucks that can, and would, give Strome more regular minutes and power-play ice time, this feels like a tap-in buy low.
The issue with the Strome fit is mostly connected to the fact that the Ducks have a ton of cap flexibility this season, with over $12 million in space to buy with Strome on the books. They’ll enter the summer, meanwhile, with $40 million in space, although they’ve got some key players in need of new deals, including most of their blue line group, star centre Leo Carlsson and underrated depth centre Ryan Poehling. There’s probably some motivation for Anaheim to get off of Strome’s money, given how peripheral he’s become to their team, but it’s unlikely that Anaheim would just give him away and Vancouver can’t exactly be spending futures to acquire a 32-year-old centre.
To make a Strome acquisition work, Vancouver would likely need to be sending items of legitimate value to the Ducks and taking Strome back as a way to juice the return. Anaheim, for example, has struggled mightily on the penalty kill and defensively this season. If Vancouver could net a conditional mid-round pick while taking back Strome in a Blueger trade, it would at least provide the club with a middle-six calibre centre for next season and an opportunity to flip Strome in 12 months for an additional return. It’s not the sexiest possible deal, but it’s the sort of trade that Vancouver should be considering at this stage of their team-building cycle.
Barrett Hayton, C, Utah Mammoth
Barrett Hayton isn’t a perfect fit for this list, but his production and role have been diminished somewhat with the Mammoth this season after a breakout 2024-25 campaign and he’s been a healthy scratch on occasion. A natural centre with some grit to his game and some utility as a sneaky, effective net front playmaker on the power play, Hayton is on an expiring contract and will have arbitration rights this summer. His declining role and the contractual dynamic — especially as Utah navigates whether or not to extend Nick Schmaltz in the wake of his career season — make Hayton a fascinating player to monitor for somebody between now and the NHL trade deadline.
At issue for the Canucks in pursuing Hayton is that he’d have real cache and trade value for a number of teams around the league, including contender-level teams. Centres come at a significant premium cost, and there’s a fair bit of regard for Hayton around the industry given his versatility, face-off winning ability, power-play utility and doggedness. Hayton could shake loose before the trade deadline for the reasons we enumerated, but he isn’t going to be inexpensive to acquire and probably isn’t a fit for Vancouver given that reality.
If the Canucks were going to find a way to get Hayton from Utah before the deadline, it would have to be as a piece coming back in part of a larger trade for one of Vancouver’s best veteran players (think Elias Pettersson, or maybe Jake DeBrusk).
Andrew Mangiapane, LW, Edmonton Oilers
The Oilers have almost zero cap flexibility and are essentially in a dollar-in, dollar-out situation. This limits how much salary they can add ahead of the deadline, and that challenge will be especially difficult this year because the new CBA rule changes prohibit a buyer like Edmonton from involving a third-party broker and acquiring a player with a double-retained salary (they required double retention to fit Trent Frederic’s cap hit in at last year’s trade deadline).
With that in mind, Edmonton will likely need to dump Andrew Mangiapane’s contract, which carries a $3.6 million cap hit through next season, before the deadline. The undersized but scrappy winger scored at least half a point-per-game in four consecutive seasons from 2021 to 2024, which included a highlight 35-goal campaign for Calgary in 2021-22. More recently, though, his production has declined, and he’s morphed into a bottom-six Energizer bunny that can chip in with secondary offence (he scored 14 goals in Washington last year despite playing limited minutes). He’s had a difficult time meshing in Edmonton and has landed in Kris Knoblauch’s doghouse, scoring only 12 points in 49 games and spending time as an occasional healthy scratch.
Mangiapane isn’t as much of a slam-dunk bounce-back candidate as Foegele, but the former is probably a harder contract to trade right now, which means the Canucks would likely have a greater chance of netting a meaningful draft pick as a sweetener. The Devils paid a third-round pick to gain $3.75 million in cap space by dumping Ondrej Palat’s contract to the Islanders (he has a $6 million AAV, but the Devils had to take back Maxim Tsyplakov’s $2.25 million AAV contract), so that may be the ballpark of what Vancouver could ask for.
Colleague Allan Mitchell recently wrote that a “third-line forward with speed and size” is the Oilers’ biggest trade deadline need. Vancouver could see if Edmonton has interest in paying draft picks to acquire O’Connor (assuming the Oilers aren’t on his 12-team no-trade list) and offload Mangiapane in one fell swoop.
Oliver Bjorkstrand, RW, Tampa Bay Lightning
Last year, the Lightning made an expensive deadline splash, sending two first-round picks and a second-rounder to the Seattle Kraken in exchange for Bjorkstrand and Yanni Gourde. The Gourde reunion has been a success, but Bjorkstrand hasn’t lived up to his end of the bargain.
Bjorkstrand is a useful player — he’s defensively sound and versatile — but his offensive impact has been quite underwhelming, especially relative to his substantial $5.4 million cap hit. The 30-year-old Dane is on pace for just 15 goals and 40 points. A 40-point pace might sound alright on the surface, but it’s disappointing relative to his plum opportunity, as he’s played on Tampa’s vaunted first-unit power-play time for most of the season. He’s scored just two five-on-five goals this season, and his two-way impact has been decent but unspectacular, as the Lightning have been narrowly outscored during his even-strength shifts.
With Florida in trouble and the East wide open, this may be Tampa’s best shot at winning another Cup with their star-studded-but-ageing core, which means GM Julien Brisebois could be an aggressive buyer ahead of the deadline. The problem, however, is that Tampa Bay has virtually no cap space to work with. If the Lightning find an opportunity to add a true difference maker, they could run into a situation where they need to dump Bjorkstrand’s contract, which expires at the end of this season. It’s hard to predict how easy it would be for Tampa to hit the eject button on Bjorkstrand’s contract, but if the market for him ended up being soft, the Canucks could offer to absorb the deal in exchange for a sweetener.