But for now, Hughes — who signed a six-year, $47.1 million contract ($7.85 million average annual value) with Vancouver on Oct. 3, 2021 — was fine with the fit in Minnesota. That allowed Rutherford to add a significant amount of young talent, with more to come, now with two first-round picks in the 2026 NHL Draft.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe that we\u2019ve been in a rebuild here for a little bit, and we\u2019ve been able to acquire some good young players, but this move today gives us some really good young players,\u201d Rutherford said. \u201cIt may not change our team in the next few months or even this season, but this doesn\u2019t have to be a full-blown rebuild where it\u2019s going to take five or seven years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe keep going the direction we\u2019re going to go on. We\u2019re going to get a really good player in June, and this thing can turn for the Canucks, certainly within the next couple of years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rossi, 24, was selected by Minnesota with the No. 9 pick in the 2020 draft and is in his third full NHL season. He has 13 points (four goals, nine assists) in 17 games. He’s in the first season of a three-year, $15 million contract ($5 million AAV) he signed with the Wild on Aug. 22, 2025.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe tried to get Rossi for a long time now, because we knew we needed help at center,\u201d Rutherford said. \u201cThe young defenseman [Buium] is a special, special player, and he’s got such a high ceiling going forward, and of course, with Ohgren, he’s another first-round pick that’s still developing and should become a regular player for the Canucks at some point in time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ohgren, 21, was selected by Minnesota with the No. 19 pick in the 2022 draft and has yet to register a point in 18 games this season.<\/p>\n
Buium, 20, was selected by Minnesota with the No. 12 pick in the 2024 draft and has 14 points (three goals, 11 assists) in 31 games.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re excited about the youth we got in return here,\u201d Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin said. \u201cWe\u2019re kind of retooling, rebuilding, and one thing we always try to do here is we try to bring in players that are 25 and younger and will continue to grow here. We have a lot of younger players in our lineup up here due to injuries that might have been forced a little bit early than we projected, but they\u2019ve done really well.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"But for now, Hughes — who signed a six-year, $47.1 million contract ($7.85 million average annual value) with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":345238,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-345237","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345237\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/345238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}