Vancouver Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin tipped his hand with some recent comments he made, suggesting that the team isn't done wheeling and dealing ahead of the 2024 trade deadline. The Canucks have already made multiple trades early on in the season, including acquiring Mark Friedman from the Pittsburgh Penguins, trading with the Calgary Flames for Nikita Zadorov, and sending Jack Studnicka to the San Jose Sharks.
If the Canucks are dead-set on keeping the Lotto Line together, they're going to need to find other ways to produce secondary scoring. The second line of Pius Suter, Andrei Kuzmenko, and Ilya Mikheyev has not produced a goal in their last six games together, and the Canucks will need more than that in order to survive in the postseason.
There's been some debate as to whether or not the Canucks should aim for a player like Penguins winger Jake Guentzel or go a different route altogether and target a center. As you probably deduced by now, we're going with the latter for the sake of this exercise. The center market is also nowhere near as flush with potential options as the winger market might be. So, as a result, it's an opportunity to be more creative and to see who (or what) is out there for the Canucks. Let's dive in.