- Connor Hellebuyck is the fourth 2026 U.S. Olympic gold medalist to try to get out inside a year
- Brady Tkachuk and Quinn Hughes are already gone, Hellebuyck and Dylan Larkin are still waiting
- Read below for where all four situations sit with camp weeks away
Connor Hellebuyck went public with his trade request Thursday, and that makes four.
Four players from the American roster that won Olympic gold in Milano Cortina, the first men’s hockey gold the United States has taken home since 1980, have tried to get out of their NHL teams inside a single year. Hellebuyck in Winnipeg, Dylan Larkin in Detroit, Brady Tkachuk in Ottawa, Quinn Hughes in Vancouver.
The Hellebuyck statement arrived Thursday afternoon through agent Ray Petkau. He asked the Jets privately several months ago, he said, and nothing about his position has changed since.
Tkachuk got out the fastest. He asked Ottawa for a trade a couple of weeks after the season ended, and Steve Staios ran negotiations with four separate teams for five or six weeks before the captain landed in Florida on June 21.
Ottawa came away with the ninth and 25th picks in the 2026 draft, a conditional 2029 first and a 2027 second. Tkachuk also got a brother out of it.
Larkin is the one who has gotten nowhere. He asked out on June 4 and is still a Red Wing with camp about three weeks off. Detroit has no general manager, Steve Yzerman was moved into an advisory role, and Shawn Horcoff is running hockey operations without the authority to trade anybody.
Hughes belongs on the list for a different reason, which is why he sits next to Vancouver on that graphic instead of Minnesota. He never filed a public request. The Canucks simply knew he was leaving.
Jim Rutherford was asked in April what went wrong in Vancouver last season, and a chunk of his answer was about his captain.
“I’ve known for some time that Quinn was not staying in Vancouver, and I’ve known before this season started, for that matter.”
Vancouver was never winning that one. Rutherford told reporters that Hughes intended to use his free agency to get back to the United States no matter how good the roster around him was.
Trading him became the only move left. The Canucks sent him to the Wild on Dec. 13 for Marco Rossi, Liam Ohgren, Zeev Buium and a 2026 first-round pick, so Hughes was already in Minnesota by the time the tournament in Italy started.
There was nearly a fifth. Columbus defenseman Zach Werenski spent months in trade rumors of his own before killing them off with a flat “this is where I want to be.”
Hellebuyck and Larkin are the two nobody has solved. Camp opens in a few weeks, and the Jets and Red Wings are both still holding a player who has told them he wants to leave.
