On Sunday night, fans of the Minnesota Wild got to enjoy the very best genre of regular-season game that there is: Amazing New Trade Acquisition Immediately Contributes To A Win. In a 6-2 stomping of the Boston Bruins, defenseman Quinn Hughes earned his first career goal for an NHL team not in Vancouver—entering the attacking zone behind the play at speed, picking up a pass, and then launching a shot through the legs of Jeremy Swayman. That No. 43 sure looks strange in forest green, but that's our problem, not the Wild's.
With the Canucks, Hughes famously always looked and sounded like he was watching the end of a movie about a trusty old dog. But on this day, he actually seemed kind of ... happy? Relatively speaking.
"It’s impressive, this team," he said in the postgame. "And as I get going here and feel more comfortable and get my legs under me, this is going to be exciting."
All right, calm down, buddy.
The Canucks took out some of their frustration on Sunday by beating the team with the other two Hughes brothers, Jack and Luke, in New Jersey. But that victory doesn't do much to redeem their status as the very first group to have completely given up in a season where nearly every squad feels pretty closely bunched in the standings. After months spent working themselves into a frenzy over the presumption that Quinn would be off to play with his siblings once his contract expired at the end of next season, and then an underwhelming start under new head coach Adam Foote, the Canucks finally decided to just get rid of the anxiety's source and start anew.
Hughes, who plays over 25 minutes per night, is second in the league only to Cale Makar as an attacking D-man, and for that the Canucks were able to get quite a haul as they prep for the rebuild: Marco Rossi, who's scored 20 goals in each of the past two years and is still just 24; Zeev Buium, a rookie defenseman with a very high ceiling; Liam Ohgren, a 21-year-old first-rounder from 2022; and a first-round pick in 2026. Even when they've played well over the past six seasons, in which they've made it to Game 7 of the second round twice and missed the playoffs four times, the Canucks have felt like kind of a half-finished roster. They've had impressive talents, like Hughes, but they've needed other guys to overachieve in order to get good results. The trade gives Vancouver more material to work with, which could benefit them in the long run, but it never feels good being the team that willfully parts with its very best player.
The Wild, meanwild, are sitting a few inches above the pack with a 19-9-5 record, and after signing star forward Kirill Kaprizov to a megadeal a few months ago, a franchise that hasn't won a playoff series since 2015 now has its sights set on ... well, the second round. They're getting what scans as unsustainably spectacular goaltending work from the duo of Filip Gustavsson and Jesper Wallstedt, and a pretty heavy share of the offensive load is being carried by their top two wingers, Kaprizov and Matt Boldy. But even at a steep cost, Quinn Hughes makes them better today. And unlike Vancouver, the Twin Cities probably won't freak out quite so much about the possibility that he might one day abandon them. They had a whole entire team do that once, so what's one free agent?
