When Pierre Turgeon was announced as part of the Hockey Hall of Fame’s class of 2023, the story for most fans of the Vancouver Canucks is how he got inducted before former Canuck Alexander Mogilny. That’s a bit of a disservice to Turgeon, who had a long and successful career in the NHL with 515 goals and 1,327 points, good for 34th all time.
But Turgeon nearly had a much more depressing connection to the Canucks.
The Canucks have never picked first-overall in their 50+ year history as a franchise and have missed out on some superstar players as a result. It started right from their first draft in 1970, when they lost the spin of a carnival wheel to their expansion cousins, the Buffalo Sabres, to decide the first-overall pick.
The Sabres won the spin and drafted future Hall-of-Famer Gilbert Perreault first overall. The Canucks picked second and took defenceman Dale Tallon.
Including the 1970 draft, the Canucks have picked second overall four times in their history and third overall four times. But they’ve never picked first.
The Canucks came very, very close to getting the first-overall pick in the 1987 NHL Entry Draft but it’s a good thing they didn’t. If they had, what was already the worst trade in Canucks history would have been even worse.
Neely for Pederson is an all-time awful trade
That trade took place on June 6, 1986, when the Canucks sent Cam Neely and a first-round pick to the Boston Bruins for Barry Pederson.
At the time, Neely was stagnating on the Canucks’ right wing behind Stan Smyl and Tony Tanti, with head coach Tom Watt refusing to trust in the 21-year-old power forward in big situations. With the Bruins, Neely blossomed into arguably the best power forward of all time, breaking the 50-goal barrier three times, including 50 goals in just 49 games in the 1993-94 season.
Meanwhile, Pederson was just 25 years old and had proven himself as one of the best forwards in the NHL early in his career, with two 40+ goal seasons and two 100+ point seasons. He was also a proven playoff performer, piling up 14 goals and 32 points in 17 playoff games in 1983.
But Pederson had also undergone major surgery to remove a benign tumour from his shoulder that also removed muscle. The season before the trade, Pederson had 29 goals and 76 points — that’s the player the Canucks got back in the trade, not the superstar he once was. Pederson had a few decent seasons with the Canucks but Neely turned into a Hall-of-Famer.
But there were nearly two Hall-of-Famers involved in the deal.
A first-round pick that almost became first-overall
Along with Neely, the Canucks sent a first-round pick to the Bruins. That pick could have been in either the 1986 or 1987 draft — the choice was left to the Bruins. After a first-round exit from the 1986 playoffs, the Canucks held the seventh-overall pick in the 1986 draft, and the Bruins decided they would rather wait until the 1987 draft. They gambled that the Canucks, who had just mortgaged their future to get better in the short-term with the addition of Pederson, would actually get worse.
They were right.
The Canucks crashed and burned in the 1986-87 season, with a 2-9-2 record in their first 13 games to kick things off. They didn’t get much better as the season progressed and, with just three games remaining in the season, they had fallen all the way to the bottom of the NHL standings.
A last-place finish would have guaranteed the Canucks the first-overall pick in the 1987 draft, as there was no draft lottery at the time. Or, rather, it would have guaranteed the Bruins the first-overall pick, as part of the Neely trade.
Can you imagine? The first-ever first-overall pick in Canucks history, traded away to the Bruins.
Ranked first-overall by NHL Central Scouting was none other than Pierre Turgeon, who was billed as the next Gilbert Perreault heading into the draft, a comparison that Turgeon tried to dismiss.
“I wouldn’t put that kind of pressure on myself,” said Turgeon ahead of the draft. “I don’t want to be the next Gilbert Perreault, I just want to be the first Pierre Turgeon.”
The Canucks lost out on Perreault to pure chance — a literal spin of the wheel. Losing out on Turgeon would have been a purely self-inflicted wound.
A late-season winning streak yanks first-overall from the Bruins
Fortunately, that ignominious result was avoided when the Canucks rattled off three-straight wins to end the season. Two of those wins were against the Los Angeles Kings, who were resting players ahead of the playoffs in hopes of upsetting the powerhouse Edmonton Oilers, while Stan Smyl scored a hattrick in their other win against the similarly playoff-bound Winnipeg Jets.
Those three wins were enough to put the Canucks two points ahead of both the New Jersey Devils and the Buffalo Sabres — the Canucks had 66 points to the Devils and Sabres’ 64 points. Just one fewer win and they would have been tied in points and fallen behind the Devils in the first tiebreaker — wins — but ahead of the Sabres in the second tiebreaker — head-to-head record. Two fewer wins would have landed them in dead last.
It was a moral victory. Instead of giving the Bruins the first-overall pick or even the second-overall pick, they instead handed over the third-overall pick.
The Sabres once again picked first overall and took Turgeon like they had taken Perreault 17 years earlier. The Devils couldn’t complain. They got their own Hall-of-Famer in Brendan Shanahan with the second-overall pick.
With the third-overall pick from the Canucks, the Bruins took Glen Wesley, a very good defenceman who played 1,457 games in his 20-year NHL career, but he wasn’t Turgeon or Shanahan.
If the Neely trade had just been Neely for Pederson, straight-up, it still would have been a lopsided trade. Adding in the first-round pick that became Wesley made it worse. But if that pick had instead been Turgeon — or Shanahan — it would rank up there with the worst trades in sports history, not just NHL history.
It would have been two Hall-of-Fame forwards for a little over three seasons of Pederson in Vancouver.
Thankfully, the Canucks’ long history of winning games late in the season when they don’t matter actually helped them this time, or at least allowed them to avoid further embarrassment.
