Drance: The Canucks’ Filip Hronek trade is needlessly desperate and risky

The Vancouver Canucks think they’re close to competing for something.

What they think they’re close to competing for is anyone’s guess. It’s not the Stanley Cup. It’s not a sustainable competitive window during which a Stanley Cup is a realistic aspiration.

A playoff spot next season is the right answer, presumably, although you’d like to see the club get out of the first month of the season with a realistic shot at playoff qualification at least once in three years before parting with premium futures in a trade for a good top-four-calibre defenseman.

Unfortunately, once again, the Canucks’ self-assessment of their short-term outlook smacks of desperation.

If this organization thinks it’s close to competing for something meaningful, well, then it’s lost.

On Wednesday, the Canucks traded multiple high-value futures — including the New York Islanders’ high-upside first-round pick acquired for Bo Horvat, and an additional second-round pick in 2023 — for 25-year-old Detroit Red Wings defenseman Filip Hronek.

The deal itself is shaped almost like a parody of the far sharper bet the Washington Capitals placed on Rasmus Sandin earlier this week. The logic of that deal — sell veterans for futures, peddle those futures into a high-upside 22-year-old — was sensible for a consistent, aging playoff team like the Capitals, intent as they are on raging against the closing of their window.

For a Canucks team that’s won fewer than one-third of their last 200 games in regulation across the last three seasons, however, it’s a baffling move.

Vancouver is currently 26th in the NHL by point percentage, has now bought ahead of the NHL trade deadline and has over $80 million in cap commitments for the 2023-24 campaign. Whatever else they have in store before March 3, that’s a maddening set of facts.

Canucks fans would far prefer to see this club put in the work required to build a durable contender. There’s growing skepticism about this collection of players and their ability to win as a group.

Something new, something thoughtful.

Something like the club appeared to be building with a series of intriguing moves this month — dealing Luke Schenn for a draft pick, moving off of Riley Stillman for a 19-year-old prospect, taking a no-risk dice roll on Vitali Kravtsov and doing really well in the Horvat trade — until all reasonable hope was once again dashed Wednesday afternoon.

All Canucks fans are asking for is a genuine journey somewhere worthwhile. That’s what fans have been pleading for this club to chart for a decade: a convincing, forward-looking direction.

Instead what they’ve got is more of the Canucks’ trademark brand of stubbornness. Canucks hockey operations leadership believes they can turn this team around quickly. Good luck to them.

It’s true that Hronek is a nice player and the sort of defender that this club is desperate for.

The young Red Wings veteran is in the midst of a career season and has shown that he can eat minutes without being a defensive liability. He moves the puck well and with a level of dynamism that will instantly set him apart from most other Vancouver defenders outside of Quinn Hughes.

Hronek has put up nearly 40 points in each of the past two seasons, he’s right-handed, he’s 25 years old and he’s affordable this season and next, and under team control thereafter. Those are very appealing traits.

Players like Hronek are expensive to acquire. They’re extremely rare.

The deal doesn’t make a lick of sense for a team in Vancouver’s position, but for a team that’s a piece or two away from making real noise, he might fit.

And the price paid would be pretty close to fair if the club had at least protected the downside risk of dealing the Islanders’ conditional first-round pick. Unfortunately, they didn’t.

When the Canucks dealt Horvat, after all, they effectively purchased a short position against the Islanders. It was savvy business.

The Islanders’ pick is most likely to fall in the teens for the 2023 NHL Draft year, which is valuable, but it could convey unprotected to the 2024 NHL Entry Draft. That prospect makes this particular asset one with the potential to change the trajectory of the Canucks franchise, in the unlikely event that the Islanders sag this season and fall flat the next.

The Islanders have trended up over the past week, but that Vancouver parted with this asset unconditionally makes this a reckless bet.

Why wouldn’t Canucks management have at least preserved the right to determine which pick they surrender in 2024, in the event that the Islanders’ conditional pick conveys?

What if both the Islanders and the Canucks struggle next season, both picks fall in the top 11 and it’s the Islanders’ bid that wins the draft lottery? It’s a nightmare scenario and one the Canucks should’ve protected themselves against.

It’s not as if the Hronek deal — and Hronek netted the Red Wings only a 2026 second-round pick less than the Arizona Coyotes acquired for a bona fide star-level defender in Jakob Chychrun on Wednesday — would’ve fallen apart if Vancouver had insisted on prudently managing that risk.

Alas, it seems that Canucks hockey operations didn’t weigh this particular risk.

And so Hronek arrives in Vancouver carrying the weight of 10 years of systematic organizational failure on his shoulders.

That pressure is deeply unfair to him. Just as having an organization operate in this manner, for this long, is deeply unfair to people that care about NHL hockey in Vancouver.

(Photo: David Kirouac / USA Today)