Mikheyev trade has aged terribly for the Vancouver Canucks
This Vancouver Canucks management group has earned a reputation for being aggressive, quickly moving off mistakes. They’ll sign a player in the summer and trade them in November if it’s not working out. It’s a strategy they’ve been mostly praised for, but it has not always worked out.
When the Canucks traded Ilya Mikheyev and Sam Lafferty last summer, it was applauded by many as management acknowledging their mistake and moving on. However, moving off those two players wasn’t cheap, as the Canucks attached a 2027 second-round pick and retained $712,500 of Mikheyev’s salary. They only got a 2027 fourth-round pick in return.
Mikheyev had fallen out of favour in Vancouver. During the 2023-24 season, Mikheyev scored just 11 goals and 31 points in 78 games and failed to show off his blazing speed, likely due to an ACL injury, which needed surgery at the start of 2023. He followed that up with a brutal playoff run where he recorded zero points in 11 games.
The enduring image of Mikheyev in last year’s playoffs is the winger outstretched in Game 7 against the Edmonton Oilers. He had deked around Oilers goalie Stuart Skinner and had a wide-open net but couldn’t put the puck home. That lack of finish plagued Mikheyev across his Canucks tenure.
In the end, this was Mikheyevâs parting âgiftâ to the #Canucks pic.twitter.com/iwLR8hLuzN
— Grady Sas (@GradySas) June 27, 2024
After that ugly season, Canucks management decided they’d be better off with the $4.75 million in cap space and traded Mikheyev at negative value to the Blackhawks.
But maybe the Canucks shouldn’t have been so quick to react to a relatively small sample size.
Mikheyev has bounced back with the Blackhawks. He has 20 goals and 34 points in 75 games without a single point on the power play. His 17 even-strength goals would rank second on the Canucks.
Beyond the better counting stats, the winger has also regained some of his blazing speed. He ranks above the 90th percentile among forwards in top skating speed and speed bursts above 20 miles-per-hour this season, per NHL Edge data.
While it’s logical that his stats would look better on his new team than if he had stayed in Vancouver, as he’s been playing recently on the first line beside Connor Bedard, there were signs an improvement was coming.
Mikheyev’s knee injury clearly sapped some of his speed, and as he’s gotten further away from his surgery, his signature burst has started to return.
In addition, Mikheyev shot just 7.5 per cent last season, far below his career average of 11.1 per cent and below the 14 per cent mark he’s above in all of the last four seasons except for last year. It wasn’t hard to see a rebound coming in that department.
The issue with moving off mistakes aggressively is that you often trade players at their lowest value, and that’s exactly what happened with the Canucks and Mikheyev. It’s a lesson management can remember for future deals.