Hodgson for Kassian: Remembering a controversial Canucks trade

Zack Kassian called it a career today. The 32-year-old put together a 661-game NHL career with the Buffalo Sabres, Vancouver Canucks, Edmonton Oilers, and Arizona Coyotes.

Around these parts, Kassian is best remembered for being part of one of the most talked-about trades in Canucks history.

Former GM Mike Gillis shocked fans at the 2012 trade deadline when he sent Cody Hodgson and Alexander Sulzer to the Sabres for Kassian and defenceman Marc-Andre Gragnani. The Canucks acquired veteran centre Samuel Pahlsson in a separate deal to fill Hodgson’s place on the third line.

The Hodgson-Kassian trade was both surprising and controversial at the time, as it saw the Canucks give up on a highly-touted prospect picked 10th overall in the draft less than four years earlier.

“I’m still very shocked right now,” Hodgson told TSN at the time.

Kassian, who was also a first-round draft pick, was caught off-guard too, saying: “I was not expecting this at all.”

Gillis had clearly grown tired of dealing with Hodgson, with the Canucks GM telling reporters after the 2011-12 season: “I spent more time on Cody’s issues than every other player combined on our team the last three years.”

After determining that they would trade him, Gillis boasted that the Canucks inflated Hodgson’s numbers.

“We made a determination that he didn’t want to be here, we built him into something we could move,” Gillis said at the time. “We put Cody on the ice in every offensive situation we possibly could.”

In a poll question posted by CBC on the day of the trade, 70% of fans voted that Buffalo won the deal.

But who actually won the trade? It was debated for years.

The answer turned out to be nobody.

Hodgson had early success with the Sabres, scoring 34 points in the lockout-shortened 48-game season in 2012-13, and posted 44 points in 72 games the year after.

But the Toronto native’s career took a turn for the worse after that. The Sabres bought him out in 2015, following a disappointing year that saw him score just 13 points in 78 games. After a one-year stint with the Nashville Predators, he retired at the age of 26.

We later learned that Hodgson was dealing with a rare muscle disease called RYR-1, which forced him to stop playing.

“My final year of playing, I was having some severe symptoms; I was having trouble breathing,” Hodgson said. “I was blacking out. My muscles were extremely tight; my whole body was just shaking.”

Kassian’s career was nearly cut short as well.

Battling alcoholism, Kassian hit “rock bottom” in 2015 after being traded from Vancouver to Montreal, where the vehicle he was riding in crashed into a tree.

“After that accident, my world came crumbling down,” Kassian said in a podcast in 2020. “There’s no easy way to put it: I broke down, I cried a couple times, I didn’t think I was going to get back to the NHL, to be honest.”

Credit to Kassian, who has now been sober for many years. He cleaned up his life and resurrected his career, but his success was never going to come in Vancouver.

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