Quoting: F50marco
I think any time a 24 year old superstar is being traded, you've already lost the trade.. Unless he's explicitly saying he wants to be traded, just sign the guy to whatever he wants.
As for trade value, for sure a 1st, maybe multiple will be involved, a good prospect and a just ok roster player to offset some of the cap. The odds of one of those pieces being as good as EP is slim to none and a decent chance the sum of the parts don't equal him either.
The only true value trade IMHO is trading EP for another teams version of EP in the same type of situation. So basically everyone's happy. Problem is I don't see any other players like that in similar situations right now.
Unless someone else pops up or EP straight up will not resign, the best bet will be to just resign him, even if its a slight overpay. Even if you want to rebuild. Trade everyone else if need be.
I think one would assume that the only reason they would be trading him is because he says he's not signing an extension in the same way Tkachuk and Dubois did with their teams. If he's traded, it's not going to be because he and Vancouver can't bridge an AAV gap. It's going to be because the Canucks have been dysfunctional the entire time he's been there.
I think regardless you're going to lose any trade with him (typically when you're trading the best player in the trade you're losing the trade) but the degree to which you lose said trade is based entirely on how you structure the return. You could structure the return like Calgary did with Tkachuk- get an All Star at the tail end of his prime and an extremely good veteran defenseman, and lock both up for a ton of money into their mid thirties, with an eye towards continuing to try and contend. This path also spectacularly backfired for Calgary, was the first nail in likely closing their contention window, and has saddled them with some tough, expensive contracts. That all seems very Vancouver-y- they don't rebuild, they're always trying to make the playoffs, and their attempts to do so rarely ever work.
Alternatively you could structure it like the Eichel trade- acknowledge that your team doesn't have it, don't dig any deeper, trade the guy who wants to be traded, target young players and futures that can ultimately supplement the future Elias Pettersson-esque players that you draft during the rebuild. You're not going to be able to replace Pettersson with a trade, and any attempts to do so will probably not work, so you might as well go for a collection of lottery tickets. Had Calgary traded Tkachuk to, say, a futures package to the Blues, the situation in Calgary might not be so bad.