Canucks and Rangers may have pulled off biggest lose-lose trade in NHL history
It’s an outcome that’s almost hard to fathom.
Two former superstar centres, who once looked like they could help the Vancouver Canucks win a Stanley Cup, now find themselves in a far different reality.
When J.T. Miller was traded from the Canucks, the New York Rangers were supposed to get a top-line forward who would help them rise above the mushy middle in the Eastern Conference.
When the Canucks chose to keep Miller over Elias Pettersson, they likely thought that, by removing a perceived locker room issue, the Canucks highest-paid player would trend back towards being a star.
Instead, the trade has been a spectacular failure for both teams.
The Canucks and Rangers are the NHL’s two worst teams in 2025-26. (NHL.com)
Rangers’ major misfire with Miller
Miller thought that things would be different during his return to New York.
“I think a fresh start was needed,” he told Sportsnet’s Iain MacIntyre last March.
“I’ve got nothing bad to say about the Canucks or Vancouver as a city. We loved it there. It felt like home and that’s all you can ask for. But, unfortunately, this is a business and in the business end of things, it was getting difficult.ā
He probably didn’t predict that things would get even more difficult.
Although Miller was good for the Rangers last season, they failed to make the playoffs. Now, they’ve fallen to the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings. They only have one more home ice win than the Canucks.
Miller has taken a lot of heat for their issues and rightly so, considering he was named captain and coined the phrase “No B.S.” as they entered training camp.
So much for that.
If it was even possible, the heat further intensified on Miller this week. The Rangers won four of five games without Miller in the lineup earlier this month. Since he returned, they’ve lost five of six games.
His bad backchecking and pedestrian production have drawn the ire of Rangers fans. The 33-year-old currently has 14 goals and 41 points in 57 games. He’s currently on pace for fewer than 50 points.
Miller has four years left on his contract after this season with an $8 million cap hit.
Canucks also fumbled the bag
It might be easy to look at Miller’s production and claim this trade as a win for the Canucks.
But that fails to look at the bigger picture.
On the surface, just getting back a top-15 first-round pick for a player in decline is good value. There are also potential contributors in young Victor Mancini and Filip Chytil if he can ever stay healthy.
But the Canucks made the foolish move of immediately flipping that draft pick for some win-now help, in the form of Marcus Pettersson and Drew O’Connor.
O’Connor has been fine, but the 27-year-old is likely nothing more than a third-liner on a contending team. Marcus Pettersson’s staunch defensive game has disappeared in Vancouver, both at five-on-five and on the penalty kill.
Just one year after they were acquired, getting both of those players in exchange for a first-round pick was an overpay. Not only that, but the prospect they traded away, Melvin Fernstrom, is off to a hot start with Pittsburgh’s AHL team.
It also turns out that trading away Miller didn’t really help out Elias Pettersson after all.
Since the deal was consummated, Pettersson has 19 goals and 53 points in 80 games. His 0.66 points-per-game is 152nd in the NHL, tying him with Marcus Johansson, Anze Kopitar, Tyson Foerster and Arturri Lekhonen.
Vancouver may have had a chance at trading Pettersson without retaining salary on him around the time of the Miller trade, but that ship seems to have sailed.
Pettersson said he wanted to embrace the pressure following Miller’s departure, but he hasn’t been able to back that up on the ice.
The calculations made by both of these teams may not have been passable in Grade Four, let alone when running billion-dollar enterprises.
But is this deal actually the biggest lose-lose deal in NHL history?
Worst trade ever?
It’s truly difficult to find a trade where both teams suffered as much as the Rangers and Canucks.
There are lots of rental-type deadline deals where both teams lost. However, those trades don’t have the long-term ramifications that the Canucks and Rangers swap does.
There are a couple of lose-lose examples, like the Ryan O’Reilly deal that saw him land with the Buffalo Sabres, and the Jaromir Jagr deal that saw him go to the Washington Capitals.
But, there’s a key difference with those trades: both were examples of good players on bad teams.
With Miller and the Rangers, that’s not the case.
The failed Jagr trade between the Capitals and Pittsburgh Penguins might represent the clearest roadmap forward for the Canucks and Rangers. In the aftermath of the Jagr deal, the Penguins and Capitals sucked enough to draft future Hall of Famers like Alex Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby, and Evgeni Malkin.
Vancouver and New York can only pray for the same fate to help eviscerate the scars of this trade.