Why the Canucks landed on Braeden Cootes with 2025 first-round pick

New York Times

8 hours ago

Late this season, new Vancouver Canucks prospect Braeden Cootes was dealing with a hip injury.
During a year in which the WHL's Seattle Thunderbirds were rebuilding but were nonetheless led to the postseason by their fiery, precocious 17-year-old captain, the decision was made to rest Cootes for a couple of games late in the schedule.
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It was precautionary. Seattle wanted to give Cootes some time to rest, heal up and get back to playing at full tilt before the playoffs.
'We kept him out for a couple of games,' Seattle general manager Bil La Forge recalled to The Athletic on Friday evening, 'So after the game-day skate, he was playing some two-on-two with the scratches against our coaches, and he just can't handle losing.
'He's just out there to get a sweat, but he was going way too hard. Harder than we wanted him to go!
'He just couldn't accept that they weren't winning that game. That's Braeden. There's no event, no competition, whether it's pickleball against his teammates, or little drills in practice, that he doesn't want to win.'
'Oh yeah,' laughed Thunderbirds head coach Matt O'Dette, recalling that game day skate. 'The coaches took some lumps there when Cootesy was injured.'
'I do remember that skate,' Cootes told The Athletic on Friday, following his selection by the Canucks with the 15th pick at the 2025 NHL Draft. 'I remember it vividly,' he added for emphasis.
'The thing is our assistant coaches, Carter Cocharne and Taylor Makin, they're really into those two-on-twos during the scratch skates,' Cootes continued. 'And they love to celebrate when they win.
'I wasn't going to let that happen. Even if my hip was dinged up.'
It's an anecdote that captures why Cootes has a chance to be special.
After all, the newest Canucks prospect doesn't have the glitziest statistical profile. His draft-season scoring profile isn't particularly high-end, and compares most closely to third-line centres like Jarrett Stoll, Brandon Sutter and Cody Eakin. Good players who had good careers and were capable of helping teams win, but not exactly players with superstar upside.
Cootes is widely viewed by amateur scouts as a player with a very high floor due to his high work rate, solid skating ability and that he's a right-handed centre who's likely to stick in the middle as he moves up to the professional ranks despite lacking prototypical NHL size for the position.
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However, he has been painted as having somewhat of a low ceiling, with some east-west playmaking limitations. Even Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin on Friday night touted Cootes as having 'middle-six upside.'
That's not to say that Cootes was a reach with No. 15 pick that the Canucks, even if, in their heart of hearts, would've preferred to find a way to trade for win-now help down the middle of their forward group.
Cootes was absolutely in range, value-wise, for where the Canucks selected him in the middle of the first round.
However, Cootes' scoring profile requires some context. Seattle was the sixth-lowest scoring team in the WHL, which limited Cootes' opportunities to manufacture offence. In his age-17 campaign, Cootes led the team in scoring, and did so while only picking up one-third of his points on the power play.
Cootes' overall scoring profile in his draft year doesn't remotely compare to similarly gifted, undersized top-six NHL centres like Nick Suzuki or Brayden Point, but he'd hardly be the first mid-first-rounder to round out his offensive game toward the tail end of his teenage years and become a top-of-the-lineup type option.
We've seen it in the past with players like Bo Horvat or Florida Panthers pivot Anton Lundell. And if it's going to happen for Cootes, it's going to be because of his hard-driving personality.
That overwhelming hatred of losing. The same stuff that caused him to battle on an injured hip because he couldn't stand the idea of his assistant coaches celebrating a win in a rinse skate drill.
'I have two brothers, so that's for sure where it started,' Cootes said of his competitive edge. 'It's something I was born with.
'I don't like to lose. In fact, I hate losing more than I even like winning.'
Evaluating potential NHL players as 17- or 18-year-old men is nearly impossible to do accurately and scientifically, even for professional evaluators.
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At the draft, NHL amateur scouting departments do their best to place the best bet possible on the most talented players, but there's so many factors — health, personality, situation, development, the ability to retain information, the discipline required to add strength or improve skating mechanics — that will shape outcomes every bit as much as talent will.
There were, arguably, higher upside bets than Cootes still available on the board when Vancouver made its selection. Cootes, however, has the sort of personality and character where the Canucks felt confident that he would do everything in his power to maximize that potential.
'(His character) along with the position where he plays, and being a right-shot center, which is extremely hard to get in the league, and for a young player like him, what he brought to the team in Seattle and around Hockey Canada too, he's an impressive young man,' Allvin said in explaining Vancouver's thought process in selecting Cootes.
'He doesn't get outworked off the ice, and he doesn't get outworked on it,' La Forge said. 'He's responsible, his number one care isn't his name bar, it's the crest. He plays for his team, he plays for his teammates. He's a special human being.'
Which is why the Thunderbirds made Cootes their captain at 17 years old. He was the youngest captain in the WHL last season.
'When it comes to that, we didn't make him captain,' La Forge said, 'he made himself the captain of our team with the way he carries himself … He was the captain before we gave him the 'C.''
'Sometimes when you make a 17-year-old your captain, there's going to be some grumbling from the older guys on your team,' O'Dette added. 'Not with Cootesy, though. I think everyone just knew.'
In the big picture, for this Canucks team at this moment, adding a top centre prospect like Cootes is probably a better use of the 15th pick than spending it on a win-now centre — unless that win-now centre was under 25, and an already established top-six option.
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Vancouver was a motivated buyer and was willing to sell its first-round pick, but was ultimately unable to find the sort of deal it had hoped to. Allvin noted, following the draft, that the trade market simply didn't bear much in the way of active players for first-round picks outside of the Noah Dobson to Montreal mega-deal.
'I've been aggressive for a couple of months here, but I think the reality is, you look around the league, most of the teams are looking for roster players,' Allvin said Friday. 'Usually, you can see some transactions regarding roster players with first-round picks, but that was not the case this year.'
Selecting Cootes may not have been plan A. And it's worrying that just like at the trade deadline, Canucks hockey operations leadership was publicly citing market forces beyond their control to explain their inability to achieve what they'd wanted (to sell Brock Boeser at the deadline, and to utilize the 15th pick to acquire win-now help at the draft).
Zooming out, though, for a Canucks team that's in desperate need of hitting some home runs — not just connecting on some singles, or even doubles with short-term goals in mind — to add value to their organization, adding a prospect of Cootes' quality isn't a consolation prize.
In fact, Cootes is precisely the sort of high-variance bet that the Canucks should be making in bulk. It's a bet on a top prospect with real potential, and perhaps more importantly, a bet on a high-quality person willing to empty the tank to reach it.