It’s not set in stone that the Vancouver Canucks will trade Bo Horvat.
The Canucks and Horvat may very well get past their contract impasse and find their way to a deal that satisfies both sides.
But there’s a reason why the team is listening to trade offers for their captain. The Canucks believe they have made their best possible contract offer to Horvat and it’s been rejected. The team can’t afford for Horvat to go to free agency and lose him for nothing, so the trade talks have begun.
What’s troubling, however, is what the Canucks are reportedly looking for when they’ve been listening to trade offers.
"Vancouver is looking instead for more of a hockey deal."
NHL insider Pierre LeBrun reported on Friday that the Canucks are not looking for futures — draft picks and prospects that would improve the team’s long-term outlook.
“I assumed the Canucks would be asking for a futures-only package, as selling, retooling teams most often do when they’re dealing with an in-season trade for a pending unrestricted free agent,” wrote LeBrun. “But so far, it seems that Vancouver is looking instead for more of a hockey deal — to upgrade at center ice and/or right-shot defense if possible and bring in a player in the twentysomething age range this Canucks management group has focused on since coming on board.”
That fits with the rumblings I’ve heard and with what the Canucks have done and said publicly. Re-signing J.T. Miller made it eminently clear that the Canucks were not willing to take even a temporary step back in order to improve long-term and general manager Patrik Allvin has repeatedly emphasized that he believes the team can make incremental improvements.
President of hockey operations Jim Rutherford said it outright in his Hockey Night in Canada’s After Hours interview: if the Canucks are going to make a trade, they will not consider a deal that causes the team to take a step back.
“Maybe we’re going to get to a point where we’re gonna have to take a look at trading one or two players that, in the offseason, we would never consider doing,” said Rutherford. “Now, the only way we would do that is to trade that player and get something in return that we can at least stay the same as we are now and get a couple more younger assets.
“That’s what I talk about when we build — it’s not necessarily a total teardown and rebuild, we just keep building piece by piece by piece.”
That’s the type of trade return the Canucks appear to be seeking for Horvat: a deal that lets the team “at least stay the same” but also adds “a couple more younger assets.”
It’s the type of trade return that doesn’t exist.
Canucks should not move Horvat in a "hockey deal"
Let’s be blunt: trading Bo Horvat will immediately make the Canucks worse.
Horvat is top five in goalscoring in the NHL, second on the Canucks in points, plays hard minutes at centre, is a key component of the team's top-tier power play, and is one of the best faceoff men in the NHL. That type of player is difficult to replace, no matter the trade return.
There’s no way for the Canucks to trade Horvat away and be just as good as they were before. No team that wants to acquire Horvat will be willing to part with NHL players who are just as good as Horvat. There would be no point in a Stanley Cup-contending team adding Horvat but simultaneously subtracting players of equal value.
A contending team definitely won’t make that kind of trade and then also throw in some younger assets. If that’s the type of trade return the Canucks are looking for, they’re chasing a fairytale.
The “hockey deal” where both teams immediately get better is held up like a platonic ideal of what a trade should be. Say that one team has a plethora of wingers but needs a defenceman; another team has too many defencemen but not enough wingers — the two teams come together and solve each others’ problems and both sides are perfectly happy.
These types of trades are rare for multiple reasons. First of all, such perfectly simpatico situations don’t happen very often where both teams’ strengths and weaknesses perfectly align like the pieces of a puzzle.
It’s also tough to find equivalent value at different positions. Instead, you risk getting the infamous one-for-one trade of Adam Larsson for Taylor Hall, where one wound up being a relatively competent top-four defenceman and the other went on to win the Hart Trophy as the league’s most valuable player.
In order to “win” such a hockey trade, you have to be confident that your pro scouting is better than that of your opposition — if the Canucks believe that, it's unearned confidence at this point.
Canucks need to accept some short-term pain
If the Canucks trade Horvat, they won’t get back a centre and/or right-shot defenceman that leaves them just as good if not better than they were before. The types of contending teams that would want Horvat wouldn’t be willing to trade away key parts of their roster to acquire him. That’s not how it works.
Most trades, particularly ones for pending unrestricted free agents that are expected to be rentals, involve both teams accepting that they will, at some point, get worse. The team trading away the rental player accepts that the loss of said player will worsen their current roster but the team acquiring the rental player also accepts that trading away picks and prospects will very likely make them a worse team in the future.
Contending teams accept that risk to acquire rental players in order to provide a boost to their short-term prospects of winning the Stanley Cup. Rebuilding teams accept getting worse in the short term because they believe that the draft picks and prospects they add will improve their chances of winning the Stanley Cup in the future.
You could argue, in fact, that any team that doesn’t accept the risk of getting worse isn’t serious about winning the Stanley Cup.
If the Canucks are unwilling to accept getting worse in the short-term when trading Bo Horvat, they’ll struggle to find a trade partner and will only succeed in making themselves worse long-term.
Horvat trade talks need to start with picks and prospects
What the Canucks need to be targeting in a potential Horvat trade is a package of picks and prospects in order to improve their future chances of winning the Stanley Cup. With Horvat on a goal-scoring heater, those conversations start with a first-round pick and a high-end prospect but don’t end there. Retaining salary and starting a bidding war should up the asking price significantly.
That's the only way the Canucks could actually get proper value for Horvat. The only way a contending team would be willing to trade away players as good or better than Horvat is if they're not as good or better than Horvat yet.
No Cup-contending team is going to trade away a top-pairing defenceman, but they might trade away a prospect who will become a top-pairing defenceman in a couple of years. Likewise, no Cup-contending team is going to trade away their second-line centre, but they might trade away a draft pick that can be used to select a future second-line centre.
The Canucks should be aiming for the same type of return that they could have received for J.T. Miller before they re-signed him this offseason. In fact, it’s fair to wonder if that’s part of the reason why Miller was never traded.
One of the standard defences for when a player doesn’t get traded is that “the offers weren’t there” — the team never got a trade offer good enough to accept.
But were the offers actually never there for Miller? Or is it more likely that the offers were just not what the Canucks were looking for: a way to somehow get no worse as a team but somehow also get younger.
Did the Canucks' refusal to accept even the possibility of temporarily getting worse cost them a chance to trade Miller for a package that would have made them better in the future? Will the same thing happen with Horvat?
