The Price is Right: Canucks seeing consequences of trading first-round picks

Some teams are in a true playoff push, some have already clinched, and now Vancouver Canucks fans have yet another reason to be jealous as the season comes to an end.

The arrival of the heralded first-round draft picks to the NHL level.

Matty Beniers down in Seattle, Kent Johnson in Columbus, and Owen Power in Buffalo have all joined their NHL rosters in the past week.

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When you miss the playoffs as often as the Canucks have, the bright side for fans is supposed to be the arrival of that top-end, first-round pick from the last year or two.

We saw it with Brock Boeser, we saw it with Quinn Hughes. This time, However? Nada.

Beniers, Power, and Johnson are first round picks from 2021, and the Canucks didn’t have a pick there at number 9, as they should have.

That was part of the price to rid themselves of the finals years of the Ericsson and Beagle and Roussel contracts, and to acquire Garland and Ekman-Larsson. The Coyotes ended up drafting Dylan Guenther, who is almost two points per game over his last two seasons in the WHL. But he is still a junior, so that wasn’t happening anyway for the Canucks.

But maybe from 2020? Nope. Remember? J.T. Miller, and I’m not suggesting you have to rail against that particular transaction.

But you make a couple of those trades in successive years and there will be consequences. And for the Canucks, that means the lack of that blue-chipper, who could help inspire the fanbase in the waning weeks of the season.

Whether that ever happens from these two drafts remains to be seen though. Fifth rounder Jacob Truscott had a nice season with powerhouse Michigan but was a third pair guy, and he’s not close to the NHL.

There continues to be development for players like Danila Klimovich and Viktor Persson, but for a team so desperate for players on ELC’s because of a cap crunch, it’s too bad that so much was spent, to this point, at the cost of the future.

A new administration is making decisions now, yes, but they need some miracles in order to repopulate the top-end draft picks that they’ve missed out on.

And then the fans will need to wait for those picks to be ready… so what will be the next spring fling for the Canucks? It might be years away.