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Jim Rutherford admits the team hasn’t performed as expected so the future is now the focus. The team’s unrestricted free agents are now available for trade.
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Published Nov 25, 2025 • Last updated 1 hour ago • 4 minute read
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Jim Rutherford admits the team hasn’t performed as expected so the future is now the focus. The team’s unrestricted free agents are now available for trade. Photo by Jason Payne /PNGArticle content
Call it whatever you want, Jim Rutherford says, but what he knows is clear: the Vancouver Canucks need to get younger.
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“We have to make this team younger. We have to get this team going in a different direction from where we’ve been,” the Canucks’ veteran president of hockey operations told Postmedia on Tuesday morning, a day after general manager Patrik Allvin let the rest of the league know that the pending unrestricted free agents on the Canucks’ books are all available in a trade: in other words Kiefer Sherwood, Teddy Blueger, Evander Kane and Derek Forbort.
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Rutherford has long been known to get before other teams by making trade-deadline-style trades months earlier, adding veterans he believes will shore up the roster for a playoff run, so this is, in essence, him looking to flip the script: offering up players of the type who usually go at the deadline months before.
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“The position of the team is that you would be willing to talk about the unrestricted free agents that would be talked about closer to the trade deadline,” he said.
“This isn’t about just looking at trading everybody. There are a number of veterans who have played very well, so this isn’t about clumping everybody together. It’s more about accelerating the obvious (moves) that could be made two months down the road.”
The return Rutherford and Allvin are looking for: younger players, prospects, or even draft picks.
“Whether it’s a younger player or a draft pick, that’s really the direction we need to go in,” he said, before laughing and bringing up the word that he knows many have been discussion — unprompted to be clear.
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“Use whatever word people like, whether it’s somewhat of a rebuild, not a full blown rebuild, but a rebuild-retool, whatever. It’s the position we’ve been in since the J.T. Miller trade.”
Which leaves the elephant in the room: Quinn Hughes’ future. Presumably the best defenceman in team history wants to play for a team that’s truly looking to contend for a Stanley Cup, or at least, as Rutherford himself has mused, a team that also features his brothers. Is building a younger team, one that has eyes on the future, something management has discussed with the captain?
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“I believe Quinn and his agent are aware of the direction we want to go. And they’re aware of the direction they want to go. Everybody wants to play on a winning team. But there’s different reasons why people make decisions,” he said.
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The Canucks came into the season short on centres, something Rutherford himself has admitted. He and Allvin spoke plenty last spring about how getting another centre, one who could play on the second line, was a priority for the off-season. And they didn’t deliver.
That lack of depth came home to roost early on, when both Filip Chytil and Blueger were knocked out of action in the same game. Blueger appears close to a return but Chytil continues to have post-concussion symptoms and at last report had yet to make any steps toward resuming physical activity.
Management thought they’d be properly competing for a playoff spot this season, Rutherford said. Right now they’re out of a playoff spot, with just nine wins on the year and a pretty brutal defensive record.
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“We were trending in the right direction the start of the season, the first couple of weeks,” he said. “And then Chytil and Blueger goes down, and so we go down from a position that already we’d admittedly said, from the start of the season, in the training camp, that we’d like to add another centre. But that centre has not been available. That has made it more difficult for this team.”
This is a young team, in the end. Many nights the Canucks have dressed five players Rutherford described as “first-year players;” not necessarily rookies, but players with minimal NHL experience. Think of Max Sasson, Arshdeep Bains, Linus Karlsson and Elias Junior Pettersson, who are all in the NHL as full-timers for the first time this season, or Tom Willander who truly is a raw rookie.
“I don’t think we should focus a whole lot on the mistakes younger players make when you have veterans making the same mistakes. I think it would be unfair to just point the finger at players. We play in a game of mistakes, there’s going to be mistakes made, but certainly these good young players are going to just get better. They’re going to be better for the experience,” he said.
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