Canucks plotting huge Sharks trade that could change everything
The Vancouver Canucks are reportedly looking to move up the draft board to grab Swedish winger Ivar Stenberg, and Canucks' roster makes it easy to see why.
David Pagnotta floated the name Tuesday night on Leafs Morning Take, listing Vancouver among the teams ready to push San Jose for the second overall pick.
The Rangers and Flames are reportedly circling the same target. It's a three-team race for the same trade window, and the Sharks hold all the leverage.
Vancouver finished 32nd overall this season. A 25-49-8 record. 58 points. A goal differential of -100, the worst in the league by a wide margin.
That kind of bottom-out usually buys you the top pick. The Canucks didn't get it. The lottery balls landed elsewhere, and now the front office is shopping its way back into the conversation.
So what does it actually cost to climb into San Jose's chair? A roster piece, a future first, a prospect package, or some painful blend of all three. Pagnotta didn't lay out the price tag, and nobody else has either.
Why Canucks' bottom six demands a top-end winger
The math behind the chase is brutal. Vancouver scored 216 goals all year, an average of 2.6 per game. That's not a roster, that's a power outage.
Kevin Lankinen carried the goalie workload through 47 games and a .875 save percentage. No team wins games when the puck barely crosses the offensive blue line.
Elias Pettersson finished with 15 goals and 51 points at a minus-30. The $11.6 million center the Canucks were supposed to build around went minus-3 over his final five games.
Filip Hronek played all 82 and posted a -23 from the back end. The home record tells the rest of the story. 9-27-5 at Rogers Arena.
Trading the farm to climb two slots is the kind of decision that defines a GM's tenure. Get it right, you reset the franchise. Miss, and you've handed San Jose your future to fix problems you already had.
Foote inherited this mess one year ago this month. He spent his first season watching the bottom fall out. Now ownership wants a swing, and the swing is expensive.
If Vancouver doesn't land the pick, the question gets uglier. Who in this lineup actually moves the needle next October?
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MAY 20, 2026
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| G | A | PTS | ||
| Dylan Coghlan | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Pavel Dorofeyev | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Nic Dowd | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Brett Howden | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Gabriel Landeskog | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Valeri Nichushkin | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Ross Colton | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Jack Eichel | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Tomas Hertl | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Ben Hutton | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Nathan MacKinnon | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Mitch Marner | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Brandon Saad | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Colton Sissons | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Devon Toews | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Jack Ahcan | - | - | - | |
| Rasmus Andersson | - | - | - | |
| Ivan Barbashev | - | - | - | |
| Brent Burns | - | - | - | |
| Jack Drury | - | - | - | |
| COMPLETE STATS | ||||