The Vancouver Canucks are not winning with Quinn Hughes out of their lineup. You don’t replace that kind of talent neatly, and you certainly don’t do that overnight. Anyone expecting instant symmetry was always going to be disappointed.
But if you look at Zeev Buium lately, you can at least do that to see Why the Canucks made the move. There is a real benefit here. Not in the shiny highlight package sense, but in the way coaches notice it. It’s the way he moves the puck. The way he doesn’t panic when the ice closes. The way to play doesn’t die on his stick. You can see the creativity, but more importantly, you can see the trust starting to take hold.
Buium isn’t Hughes, but he can be solid in his own way
Buium is not Quinn Hughes. There isn’t another Hughes anywhere. Hughes bends the game in a way that is rare even at the NHL level. That was never the standard that Buium had to meet. What matters is that he brings something different– and perhaps something this blue line hasn’t had in a while.
Defensively, Buium plays a tougher game than people might expect. He’s not just a stick-on-puck defender or a fly-by disruptor. He gets into people. He leans on it, under the dots. Last night was a good example: fighting at the net front, traffic in the creases, bigger bodies trying to establish their position. Buium did not give up any ground. That matters. Especially in the Pacific, where skills still need to survive contact.
That edge changes the way you project it. The question now is not whether he can play. It’s who he plays with.
Who will the Canucks pair Buium with?
Clutching is everything for young defensemen, and the Canucks will have to be careful here. If you place it with the wrong partner, you will see flashes mixed with confusion. If you put it in the right place, things can be sorted out quickly. Someone like Hronek makes sense on paper: structure, reliability, experience. But there is also the temptation to delve into the youth and see what happens when Buium grows alongside another young piece like Willander.
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That’s the tightrope Vancouver walks. What complicates matters is the context. Buium emerged from a program that had carefully developed it. Minnesota gave him time, structure and a clear role. Vancouver is different. The expectations are louder. The margins are thinner. Errors are noticed.
Yet the long term is important here.
Buium will be a Blueliner who plays 25 minutes each game
Buium looks like a guy who will play 25 minutes a night. He skates well enough to handle it. He competes hard enough to survive. He’s comfortable in all situations: penalty kills, late-game shifts and ultimately the power play, but not in the same way Hughes did.
He won’t skate sideways on the blue line like Hughes does. He will attack differently. More downhill. More direct. He won’t circle back again and again to control the puck like Hughes did. He’s not worse, just different.
What the Canucks do in the coming months will tell us a lot. If they mobilize veterans and focus on youth, it shows trust. If they give him too much shelter, it indicates caution. Either way, patience will be needed – from the team and from the fan base.
The Hughes trade was never short-term
The trade that brought Buium to the Canucks was never about the short term. It was about reshaping the backbone of the blue line.
And while it may feel messy now watching Buium fight, skate and push back, it’s hard not to think that in a few years the Canucks will look back on this deal and say, that’s when this franchise started to improve.
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