Canucks played well last night. The downside of beating teams close to them in the standings is it will hurt them in the draft. The draft is projected to be pretty good this year. Obviously there is Hughes, but there are also projected to be some pretty good players in the top 8. Canucks do not have enough top end talent to compete any time soon, so need at least one more year of a top 6 pick. Finishing in 18-20 place, not in the playoffs, not in the zone with high end draft talent makes it tough to get better. You end up like Carolina. Canucks drafting has been hit and miss, so they need high picks. I guess those don't guarantee anything, Virtanen and Juolevi were high picks. but they could have had Ehlers instead of Virtanen, and not picking Tkachuk over Juolevi was a predictable screw up on draft day. Both their 2nd round picks from 2 years ago (Lind, Gadjovich- 1 goal between them this season) haven't been able to adapt to the AHL so not much in the pipeline other than Hughes and Dipietro.