The Minnesota Wild head to Vancouver on Sunday night with one storyline looming larger than the game itself: Quinn Hughes is making his first trip back to the city that used to be home.
Hughes will arrive with 13 points - two goals and 11 assists - through 11 games, while averaging 27:25 of ice time a night for Minnesota. It’s the kind of production that reminds everyone exactly why his return is going to draw attention, even with the Wild first needing to get through a Saturday stop in Seattle.
Minnesota enters that back-to-back off a 2-1 loss in Calgary on Thursday, its second straight defeat, and sits at 6-3-2. The Kraken, meanwhile, are 7-3-1 and currently ahead of the Wild in the Western Conference standings.
Still, the question hanging over the weekend isn’t just about the standings. It’s about what kind of reception Hughes gets in Vancouver after the Canucks traded their captain to Minnesota last December.
The online chatter picked up after Brady Tkachuk’s return to Ottawa on Wednesday, when the Senators fans let him have it from the start. Ottawa booed during his tribute video, then watched their team beat Florida 5-1 in what became a noisy revenge night. Tkachuk’s situation, though, was a very different one from Hughes’.
As Farhan Lalji put it on Donnie & Dhali:
“There's no way it's going to happen the same way in Vancouver on Sunday..”
Farhan Lalji, via Donnie & Dhali
Lalji expanded on that thought by pointing to the way the two exits unfolded. He said Tkachuk had told Ottawa he was committed before changing course and engineering his way out, while Hughes never made that kind of promise to Vancouver. Lalji also noted that Jim Rutherford essentially prepared the market by making it clear Hughes could end up elsewhere, including a possible move to play with his brothers.
He also didn’t hesitate when talking about Hughes’ place in Canucks history.
“Quinn Hughes is by far the best defenseman ever to have played for the Vancouver Canucks, and easily a top five Canuck ever with Bure, the twins, and Luongo… So I think it’ll be mixed as opposed to Ottawa.”
Farhan Lalji, via Donnie & Dhali
The numbers back up Hughes’ standing in franchise history. He left Vancouver with 432 points - 61 goals and 371 assists - in 459 games, the most ever by a Canucks defenseman. He also won the Norris Trophy in 2023-24 after piling up 92 points.
That total dwarfs the rest of the blue-line leaderboard in Vancouver. Alex Edler is the only other defenseman in franchise history anywhere near Hughes, finishing with 409 points, but he needed 925 games to get there.
After Edler, the drop-off is steep: Mattias Ohlund had 325 points, Jyrki Lumme and Dennis Kearns each had 321, and Doug Lidster finished with 307. Hughes cleared all of them in roughly half a career.
Bryan Hayes doesn’t expect the crowd to come anywhere close to what Tkachuk faced in Ottawa, either.
“Nowhere close to it. I don’t think it’ll be even close.
Just because it was done kind of quietly and quickly and there was no… Yeah, no trade protection, right? He couldn’t dictate where he was going to go.
It wasn’t nearly as politicized.”
Bryan Hayes, via TSN
Even Jim Rutherford referred to Hughes as “one of the greatest Canucks of all time” when the trade was announced. But that doesn’t mean everyone in Vancouver is prepared to greet him warmly.
Bruce Boudreau, speaking to Joe Smith and Thomas Drance of The Athletic, said Hughes “played his ass off for [Vancouver] every night,” but still expects the former Canuck to be the villain when Sunday night arrives.
Vancouver’s recent history suggests the reaction could land somewhere in the middle. Bo Horvat got a light round of boos when he first touched the puck in his November 2023 return, then received a standing ovation during his tribute video.
J.T. Miller had a similar night last October, drawing boos early before hearing cheers during his tribute.
So Sunday still feels like a guess. The signs point to something softer than Ottawa’s treatment of Tkachuk, but the final answer won’t come until Vancouver fans decide how they want to handle their old star.
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