Canucks: Quinn Hughes is gone. We must understand why

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Yell at Quinn Hughes all you want, but the truth is the organization wasn’t strong enough and that’s the problem.

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Published Apr 02, 2026 • Last updated 18 minutes ago • 3 minute read

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quinn Quinn Hughes and the Minnesota Wild hosted his former Canucks team on Thursday night. Photo by Michael Reaves /Getty ImagesArticle content

As the hours counted down to Thursday’s first meeting between the Canucks and former captain Quinn Hughes, it was hard not to re-hash what has been.

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The greatest defenceman in team history is gone. He’s been gone for months.

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Seeing him again is like ripping the dressing off a still-seeping wound. No one likes that feeling, and it makes sense that people might yell at him because of that. But that’s misplaced frustration.

Why he left must be understood.

This season probably never had a chance in hindsight, but it certainly came to a crashing end when Hughes was traded to Minnesota in early December.

The era that was, that had lingered on into this season, was over. You can’t help but wonder if it could all have been different.

Hughes and his teammates all talk of the 2023-24 squad and what it was doing. Hughes told The Athletic on Thursday that the way the Canucks were playing in January 2024, they felt like they were just going to win every night.

Let us not forget that they sent five players (plus just-traded-for Elias Lindholm) to the All-Star weekend, plus coach Rick Tocchet.

They really were going places then. The future was bright. That it would come crashing down didn’t seem possible.

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And yet here we are, standing amongst the wreckage. And in the destruction, we can see how weak the foundation all was. Maybe there was no way that Hughes ever would have stayed.

There were certainly things you know he set aside here while they were winning, things like playing closer to the east coast, and finding an organization that had the bigger picture clearly in focus, that didn’t have so many things micromanaged to death.

When you’re winning, you can put up with these things. When you’re not …

Despite what fans may think, Hughes showed up every night and tried to make things happen. He was the team’s best player, and that’s more obvious than ever in his absence. The number of times every game he would spin out of a pressure spot with control of the puck, resetting his team’s playing posture? It happened so often you can’t even really count it up.

That’s what this team, this city, lost. It’s an absolute failure by the Canucks organization that he is gone.

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Yes, it seems likely that he wouldn’t have been here forever, but he wasn’t burning to leave until everything blew up and it just wasn’t worth fighting through all the excess chaff anymore.

It’s the job of NHL teams to create a seamless experience for its players. They are to focus on making themselves better. That’s it. They shouldn’t have to wonder why they are the only team in the league without a practice facility or a plan for one. They shouldn’t have to watch their training staff pack up all the team’s gear whenever they have an off-site practice. They should have a place to skate in the summer if they want.

They shouldn’t have to sort out why so much of the team’s public image is adversarial. The team and the community should just be one.

These small things all add up.

At the end of the day, it’s the winning that matters most.

The great American novelist Thomas Wolfe wrote that you can’t go home again — a book title even — basically saying that the past is just that and you just can’t get back to how things were. That things were good then, and they’re different now.

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“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory,” Wolfe wrote.

Hughes, obviously feels that. We all feel that, really. Those were good times.

In the end, the Canucks failed as an organization to keep those good times going, to keep that sense of “home” alive. That’s what you do in sport — keep “home” thriving for as long as you can.

Of course, everyone dreams of starting afresh, of building a new era that can match the promise everyone felt in 2024. But in the end, we must not lose sight of why that era failed in the first place.

If the Canucks can’t learn from why Quinn Hughes left, nothing will ever really get better.

pjohnston@postmedia.com

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Canucks: Quinn Hughes is gone. We must understand why

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