What is the trade value of Vancouver's 2025 first-round NHL Draft pick?
The Vancouver Canucks intend to swing the bat this offseason.
The roster needs a significant freshening up after a dismal, drama-plagued campaign saw the club miss the Stanley Cup playoffs and trade their top centre in-season. The franchise sits at a major fork in the road with an underachieving core group that will enter next season with a lot to prove, and surrounded by a ton of uncertainty about its future.
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Fireworks shouldn't just be expected to pop off above Griffiths Way this summer; they're almost certainly required if this hockey club is going to protect its future and salvage an era of Canucks hockey that once seemed so promising.
In considering Vancouver's options this offseason, one asset looms especially large as potential trade asset weaponry: the club's 2025 first-round pick, which sits at No. 15 in the draft order.
Given the club's short-term priorities and their Les Snead-like organizational track record, the No. 15 pick feels like a gimme to be dealt before Vancouver makes a selection at the decentralized 2025 NHL Entry Draft, to be held in Los Angeles June 27-28. That is why, in a recent The Athletic staff mock draft, we just projected a trade rather than have Vancouver make a draft selection.
Given the widespread expectation — held both by us and the industry at large — that Vancouver is more likely than not to utilize the pick to bolster their roster, we figured we'd best give the buying power of this central asset more thought and attention.
We built a data set, based on 10 years' worth of draft trades, to try and enhance our understanding of how valuable a middle-of-the-order first-round pick on the trade market has been, historically. So what should Vancouver be able to acquire with their first-round pick?
First-round picks move relatively frequently on the NHL trade market. They're a standard form of currency, the de facto coin of the realm, utilized as a major or major secondary asset in all sorts of trades.
For our purposes, we want to set up parameters in parsing the history of NHL trades that are roughly analogous to the Canucks' situation while also having a big enough data set to create some meaningful takeaways from this exercise.
In order to try and get some sense of what the No. 15 pick should be worth on the trade market, we've decided to look at NHL trades over the past 10 years that prominently featured first-round picks between 11th and 20th. We wanted to cast something of a wider net downstream of the 15th selection while keeping the parameter really tight as the draft order inches closer to the top 10.
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This is because expected draft value typically falls very quickly at the outset of the NHL Entry Draft and then flattens out somewhat. As a result, the value of the 10th pick tells us marginally less about what we can expect the value of the 15th than the value of the 20th pick, given expected draft pick value.
We also wanted to exclude certain types of transactions for the sake of simplicity, and to keep this exercise as straightforward and true to life as possible to the situation that Vancouver finds itself in ahead of the 2025 NHL Entry Draft.
For example, if Vancouver moves their pick, it's going to be to acquire win-now help. As such, we're not quite as interested in the exchange value of the No. 15 pick from the perspective of trading down at the NHL Entry Draft, to maximize aggregate draft capital. Trades that don't feature an active NHL-level player (or promising prospect) won't be included in our data set as a result.
There are a couple of other sorts of deals that we're going to exclude here. Somewhat frequently, picks in this range of the first round are moved as part of deals at the trade deadline that fall into a classic 'buyers chasing playoff success' pattern that we often see from NHL teams.
If Vancouver moves their pick, it won't be in this type of deal. And anyway, the trade value of win-now players at the NHL trade deadline is usually inflated, and considering them here doesn't really help us understand what teams would part with in the weeks leading up to the draft to acquire the 15th selection.
Deals of this sort, or deals where the pick was acquired 12 months (or more) ahead of time, have been excluded from this sample.
There is one more somewhat common variety of trade that pops up when you analyze the recent history of mid-first-round draft picks: the in-season trade that doesn't really fall into the classic trade deadline buy/sell bucket.
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Usually, these sorts of deals occur in midseason and involve a player who either has term remaining on their deal, or are otherwise viewed by the team acquiring them as 'long-term fits.' The 2023 No. 17 pick that moved twice, for example, from the New York Islanders to the Canucks and then from Vancouver to Detroit while as the principal asset that sent Bo Horvat to Long Island and Filip Hronek to Vancouver, are two examples of this sort of trade.
For now, we'll also exclude this variety of deal from our analysis. In-season trades necessarily are governed by different dynamics, given the relative dearth of teams with cap space during the campaign, and we're really focused on trying to get a better feel for the purchasing power of Vancouver's 2025 pick in the period leading up to and during the NHL Entry Draft itself.
With those qualifiers out of the way, we're left with nine examples of pre-draft trades that included mid-first-round picks based on our definition and returned active players ahead of or during the NHL Entry Draft:
Now that we've laid out our data set, let's go over some key takeaways to be aware of in evaluating the exchange value of picks like Vancouver's 2025 first-rounder.
The first thing that jumps off the page when we consider these nine trades and the patterns that exist within this data set is that in every single relevant, comparable deal the team acquiring the more established, proven player had to include additional assets beyond the mid-first-round pick in the trade.
A pick in the middle of the first-round draft order can serve as the centrepiece asset of a trade for a good young player and often has over the past decade, but over the past 10 years, we haven't seen a pick within range of Vancouver's No. 15 selection be utilized straight up to acquire a proven commodity NHL-level talent.
While there isn't much in the way of a clear positional trend that we can pick out of this data set — there are several prime aged forwards, and several good young defenders that were acquired for packages built largely around mid first-round picks in our sample of trades — it seems notable that the only nominal centre in our dataset is Kirby Dach. And at the time of the trade, Dach had just completed his age-21 campaign and had yet to hit more than 10 goals or 30 points in a single season.
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Across the past decade of NHL trade activity, there isn't really an example of a team trading an asset like Vancouver's 2025 pick and returning an established centre in the transaction.
Given that a 'top two-line centre' is the Canucks' greatest need this offseason, that isn't an especially promising historical truth. In all likelihood, if history is any guide, the No. 15 pick won't be sufficient to land the centre ice help that Vancouver craves this summer.
Across our data set, there are two primary profiles that the primary targets acquired by teams hawking mid-first-round picks on the trade market fit into.
The first profile is the young up-and-coming player who has usually played through their entry-level contract. This is a label that rather neatly matches nearly half of the main target players in our dataset (Reinhart, Dach, Romanov, Hamilton).
The second profile that pops up in these deals is the more obviously established, about-to-be-extension-eligible player in their mid-20s. This label applies neatly to the four remaining names in our data set (Lucic, Trouba, Ristolainen and Fiala).
In all of these cases, it had become apparent that the team in question would have difficulty retaining the player for personal reasons or cap/financial ones, necessitating something of a hard pivot by their current team.
With both profiles, it seems, cap and financial dynamics — and the pressure point of either negotiating a second contract, or buying unrestricted free agent years when a player is about to become eligible to hit the open market — rather clearly seem to shape which players tend to move in these sorts of trades.
There's a lesson in that, perhaps, in that it might help us understand which sorts of players might be available to Vancouver in a trade involving the Canucks' 2025 first-round pick in the weeks ahead. A player like Minnesota Wild centre Marco Rossi, for example, would fit into the category of a player coming off his entry-level deal and in need of a significant raise. A player like Anaheim Ducks forward Trevor Zegras or Dallas Stars winger Jason Robertson, on the other hand, would fit in the latter category of a player approaching extension eligibility and the age at which NHL players become eligible for unrestricted free agency.
Finally, we have one last player profile that doesn't fit neatly into the other obvious categories, the sore thumb trade in our sample: the Kasperi Kapanen deal.
Kapanen was 23 years old at the time of this trade and one full season into a second contract bridge deal when the Pittsburgh Penguins reacquired him from the Toronto Maple Leafs in late August of 2020. The date there tells the entire story: Kapanen's bridge deal was signed in a world where the Maple Leafs and general manager Kyle Dubas would've reasonably expected the salary cap to rise on an annual basis, and the trade occurred just a few months after the imposition of the NHL's flat cap era, when it was clear that salary cap austerity would shape the league for the next several seasons.
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The Kapanen deal is, in some ways, a relic of a moment and time. A trade shaped by factors that we aren't likely to see repeated this summer, given the historic cap growth that the NHL is projecting for next season (and for two seasons beyond that).
It is nonetheless a trade that sticks out in this data set as especially instructive from a Canucks perspective. The deal was completed, after all, on the Pittsburgh Penguins side by current Canucks president Jim Rutherford during his time as Pittsburgh's general manager.
(Top photo of Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
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