Canucks made a disastrous move that changed the team forever
Lane Hutson just put up 78 points as a sophomore defenseman in Montreal. The Canucks once had him on a Do Not Draft list because he was too small.
That nugget surfaced Wednesday afternoon from insider Rick Dhaliwal, and it landed like a slow-burn punchline aimed straight at Vancouver's front office.
Hutson finished the regular season with 12 goals and 66 assists in 82 games for the Canadiens. Plus-36. That's not a depth blueliner. That's a top pairing offensive engine.
His cap hit right now? $950,000.
Read that number again. Montreal is paying roughly the price of a fourth-line winger for one of the most productive young defensemen in the league.
Meanwhile, the Canucks finished the year 25-49-8, dead last in the overall standings at 32nd. They gave up 316 goals. Their power play needed help all season, and their blue line never stabilized. Oh, and they traded Quinn Hughes.
Next coach inherits the fallout in Vancouver
Adam Foote took over as head coach last May, and he's been handed a roster that ranks last in the league. The mistakes weren't his. The cleanup is.
Hutson, by contrast, runs Martin St-Louis's power play in Montreal. He put up 18 power play assists and a game-winning goal during a season where the Habs went 48-24-10.
Imagine that puck-mover quarterbacking Vancouver's man advantage instead. Now stop imagining, because that's the version of reality the Canucks scouted away from on purpose.
Montreal beat Vancouver twice this season, including a 6-3 win at the Bell Centre back in January. Hutson was already a fixture on the top unit by then.
The frustrating part for Canucks fans isn't just that they passed. Every team passed. He went 62nd overall in 2022. Hutson slid because half the league shared the same concern about his frame.
The difference is the label. A "too small" pre-draft note is one thing. A formal Do Not Draft tag is a different category of conviction.
And that's the kind of internal memo that ages like milk left on a road trip.
Hutson is 22. He's locked in at under a million dollars for now. The next contract is 8,85 millions and is worth every penny.
Vancouver, sitting at the bottom of the standings with a thin defense corps, gets to watch him do it from across the country.
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MAY 20, 2026
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| G | A | PTS | ||
| Dylan Coghlan | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Pavel Dorofeyev | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Nic Dowd | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Brett Howden | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Gabriel Landeskog | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Valeri Nichushkin | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Rasmus Andersson | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Ross Colton | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Jack Eichel | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Tomas Hertl | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Ben Hutton | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Nathan MacKinnon | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Mitch Marner | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Brandon Saad | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Colton Sissons | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Devon Toews | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Jack Ahcan | - | - | - | |
| Ivan Barbashev | - | - | - | |
| Brent Burns | - | - | - | |
| Jack Drury | - | - | - | |
| COMPLETE STATS | ||||