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Ryan Strome's average time on ice has fallen by over four minutes this season with the emergence of young stars. Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images
Which NHL players are falling out of favor or perhaps not getting the opportunity they could receive elsewhere?
The signs aren’t hard to pick up on if you pay close attention. Players in this category often go through a significant dip in offensive production, ice time, role or performance. That, or they’re struggling to carve out a meaningful role in the first place.
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We’ve already spent time covering the big trade deadline targets. Here, we will highlight under-the-radar trade candidates falling out of favor. This doesn’t guarantee they’ll be dealt by the March 6 deadline — some of these players could be shopped in the summer, or their teams may be forced to ultimately hold the bag if there’s limited trade interest. Maybe a few of these players even figure it out with their current team.
But one way or another, here are 10 players whose stock is dropping internally and who have a decent chance of moving teams before the 2026-27 season starts.
If Warren Foegele’s first season in Los Angeles felt like a dream, his second has turned into a nightmare.
The versatile winger had the best year of his career in 2024-25 after signing a $10.5 million, three-year contract in free agency, establishing new personal bests in goals (24), assists (22), points (46) and average minutes played (16:10). At his best, Foegele plays with speed and is an effective forechecker who helps keep plays alive in the offensive zone. The Kings spent a lot of time on offense while Foegele was on the ice last season, as evidenced by his impressive shot and chance share rates.
However, opportunity has been a little tougher to come by in Year 2 following the additions of Corey Perry and Joel Armia last summer. Foegele also missed a couple weeks to injury early in the season and hasn’t been able to regain any form since rejoining the lineup. He’s struggled with consistency previously. With Foegele’s production cratering — he has six goals and eight points in 42 games — the Kings made him a healthy scratch for the first time last week.
Still, he remains a strong candidate for a bounce-back. Foegele has a great shot and his shooting percentage has dipped below 10 percent this season. The Kings have only shot 5.2 percent collectively during his even-strength minutes. The risk of acquiring Foegele is also mitigated by the front-loaded nature of his contract, which is already more than two-thirds paid out despite running through next season.
Playing time has been difficult to come by for Järnkrok, who has been routinely scratched by Maple Leafs coach Craig Berube and is averaging a career-low 11:29 when he dresses. That’s coming off a 2024-25 season nearly lost entirely to groin and sports hernia surgeries.
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Järnkrok is an undersized forward who doesn’t play with any physicality — not exactly traits generally prized by Berube. Age and health-related decline may also be catching up to him. However, his biggest attribute has always been his ability to read the ice and consistently make good decisions with the puck. Järnkrok owes his 13 NHL seasons as much to his brain as his body.
It’s certainly fair to wonder how much gas is left in the tank here. The on-ice results raise plenty of red flags. However, Järnkrok’s poor output this season is at least partly due to usage, which has included the highest percentage of defensive-zone starts in his career.
Trading for him now would be a low-stakes roll of the dice because of the negligible cost in both assets and financial commitment. While Järnkrok’s contract carries a $2.1 million cap hit, he’s only taking home the league-minimum $775,000 in actual salary in the final year as a pending UFA. He only needs to provide replacement-value to justify the gambit.
One of the only benefits of playing on lousy, talent-starved rebuilding teams is that there’s usually plenty of opportunity up for grabs. There aren’t many high-profile stars blocking your path, so if you play well, you’ll be rewarded with tons of ice time and power-play opportunities. Vatrano capitalized on that during some of Anaheim’s lean rebuilding years, averaging 27 goals per season from 2022 to 2025, which earned him a three-year, $18 million extension that carries a $4.57 million cap hit due to deferred salary.
However, with Anaheim’s recent infusion of high-end forward talent — Beckett Sennecke, Cutter Gauthier and Leo Carlsson have all broken out, and Chris Kreider and Mikael Granlund are new middle-six arrivals as well — Vatrano has fallen considerably down the depth chart. His average ice time has collapsed from 17:33 last year to 12:21, and he’s gone from averaging 2:38 on the power-play last year to just 47 seconds per game this season.
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Vatrano’s reduced opportunity isn’t entirely surprising, as he was never a prolific play-driver and isn’t as valuable as the team’s current top-six forwards. But still, nobody could have predicted how severe the decline in his production would be: he’s slumped to just three goals and three assists in 38 games this season.
This may be a tricky contract to move — he has two years remaining at his $4.57 million AAV — but we saw both last offseason and with the recent Ondrej Palat trade that it’s far easier to move inefficient contracts in this rising cap climate than during the flat cap era. Perhaps this is a file the Ducks will revisit in the summer, since that’s when hefty contracts are typically easier to offload.
Määttä was acquired from the Detroit Red Wings in an October 2024 trade while Utah was weathering a series of injuries and parlayed that opportunity into a three-year, $10.5 million extension with the Mammoth last March.
This season, he’s almost lost his grip on a spot in the lineup entirely.
With the arrival of Nate Schmidt last summer and Nick DeSimone’s emergence this season, plus an extended run of good health on the back end in Utah, Määttä started getting healthy-scratched in November. He endured a stretch of 19 straight scratches from mid-December through late January. That’s an incredibly difficult hand to be dealt, even for a well-traveled veteran of nearly 800 career games.
Määttä is a big man and an average skater, who doesn’t use his size to engage opponents physically. However, he’s an experienced defender with a reputation for being a high-character teammate and can still chew through third-pairing deployment. It’s telling that he was selected to represent Finland at the Milan Cortina Olympics despite enduring an incredibly challenging season with the Mammoth.
Höglander, 25, has vacillated between promising flashes and the coach’s doghouse over his six seasons with the Canucks.
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The undersized but scrappy Swedish winger first burst onto the scene in the 2020-21 season, when he scored 27 points in 56 games (ranked top-50 among NHL forwards in five-on-five points) as a rookie under Travis Green. He fell out of favor under Bruce Boudreau over the next couple of years, which included a demotion to the AHL for parts of 2022-23. Höglander broke out with 24 goals during the Canucks’ Pacific Division-winning 2023-24 season. All 24 of those goals were at five-on-five, which tied him with Mikko Rantanen for 10th most in the NHL that year.
Unfortunately, Höglander lost Rick Tocchet’s trust during Vancouver’s 2024 playoff run, averaging just 10:00 and recording only two points in 11 games, including two healthy scratches. The Canucks’ front office made a bullish bet on Höglander anyway, signing him to a three-year, $9 million extension ahead of the 2024-25 campaign, a full year before his contract was set to expire as a restricted free agent.
So far, that gamble hasn’t paid off. Höglander’s speed, forechecking tenacity and skill all point to a player who should be a consistent top-nine player, especially because his underlying play-driving metrics have always been strong, but his defensive warts have meant that his ice time and role have always been limited; the 15:27 per game he averaged in his rookie season under Green is by far the highest of his NHL career.
Höglander didn’t make his season debut until Dec. 8 and has been playing catch-up since then. He’s scored just two points in 18 games, has averaged only 11:32 per game and occasionally sat in the press box as a healthy scratch. He suffered a lower-body injury earlier this week against the San Jose Sharks. In the big picture, it feels increasingly unlikely that the organization views him as integral to its future.
This could present an interesting buy-low opportunity for a player who has long been an analytics darling and could shine with a change of scenery and a longer leash. He plays with enough grit and energy that his game can translate well to a bottom-six role, although his contract, with two years remaining at a $3 million cap hit, is a tad expensive.
Even though he’s more associated with being a playmaker than a goal scorer, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Nyquist has zero goals through 32 games this season. That’s a pretty glaring sign that the one-year, $3.25 million contract he signed with the Winnipeg Jets in free agency last summer has not yielded anything close to its expected value.
Now Nyquist has been banished to the press box, scratched for 12 of 15 games since the start of January. He needs to be producing offense to create value in the lineup.
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Even at age 36, Nyquist remains a strong skater with offensive flair. He’s just two years removed from a 75-point season in Nashville, but saw his output drop to 28 points in 79 games split between the Predators and Minnesota Wild last season.
Nyquist has been moved ahead of the trade deadline three times previously in his career and will be hoping for a fourth opportunity to join a contender for a playoff run.
Two years ago, Lafrenière was on the cusp of potential stardom. The 2020 No. 1 pick was mediocre relative to expectations through his first three NHL seasons, but he finally broke out in 2023-24 with a 28-goal, 57-point campaign. He followed that up with a dynamic, electric 2024 postseason performance, scoring eight goals and 14 points in 16 games as New York advanced to the Eastern Conference final. Still only 22 at the time, it seemed that with more ice time (he still hadn’t sniffed consistent time with the first-unit power play) and natural age-related growth, he would build on this breakout 2023-24 campaign.
The Rangers were certainly sold on that idea, as they inked Lafrenière to a seven-year, $52.15 million contract less than three weeks into the 2024-25 season, eight months before he was due to become an RFA. Frustratingly, he regressed to just 17 goals and 45 points last year and is on a similar offensive pace this season.
Many will debate why Lafrenière, who’s now 24, has failed to live up to the hype — whether it’s poor development on the Rangers’ part, a lack of consistent top six and PP1 usage in his early years, the lack of progression in his skating or perhaps something mental — but the larger point is that he’s six years into his NHL career and the odds of him becoming a high-end player in New York are dwindling by the day.
This puts the Rangers in a dilemma: Do they sell Lafreniére now, while he still has considerable value because he’s youngish and has cachet? Or does it make more sense to give him a final opportunity to be The Guy once Panarin is gone?
One of multiple “pump and dump” veteran assets acquired by the Sharks last summer, the one-year, $3 million contract Skinner signed on July 11 telegraphs their plans for him: a no-trade clause through Jan. 30 before converting to an eight-team trade list.
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We’re now in the window where Skinner can be dealt. The arrangement has not gone as well as either side had hoped, with Skinner a routine scratch and sitting on six goals in 32 games following last year’s 16-goal output for the Edmonton Oilers. That won’t have pumped his value to the degree San Jose was originally hoping.
Skinner’s ability to score goals remains his most attractive attribute, however, thanks to a deceptive release and ability to find pockets to get off his shot. He’s done a fair bit of damage at even strength, too, with all 16 of his goals last season in Edmonton coming at five-on-five.
While he’s not an overly physical player and carries some concerns on the defensive side of the puck, the fact that he’s on an expiring contract should help the veteran find a new home before the trade deadline passes.
Poitras was a can’t-miss young player just two years ago, when he cracked the Bruins as a full-time NHLer at 19. The undersized but slick playmaking center made an excellent first impression with his crafty offensive vision and smooth puck skills, notching 13 points in his first 27 games. The timing of Poitras’ emergence as an effective middle-six pivot could not have been better, as this was Boston’s first year without Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci anchoring the center ice position.
Unfortunately, Poitras sustained a shoulder injury playing for Team Canada at the World Juniors that winter. He tried to manage the injury when he returned to Boston, but was quickly shut down to have shoulder surgery in early February. Poitras hasn’t really been the same since — he split last season between the AHL and NHL, and spent all of this season in the minors before a recent recall due to Elias Lindholm’s injury.
Poitras has been passed in the organization by Fraser Minten, and with the Bruins still owning a couple of veteran top-nine centers in Lindholm and Pavel Zacha, there doesn’t appear to be much long-term opportunity for him in Boston. He’s still only 21, and considering how hard it is to find talent down the middle, there should be interest in Poitras, even if it’s somewhat lessened by the concerns around his size and stagnating development.
Strome is in a similar boat to Vatrano, a once-solid Ducks veteran who has been marginalized by the emergence of Anaheim’s higher-end forward talent.
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The 32-year-old right-shot scored exactly 41 points in three consecutive seasons up until this year’s plummeting ice time (12:05) and production (eight points in 32 games). Not only is Strome a redundant piece on the roster, but his sizable $5 million cap hit should also be another motivating factor for the Ducks to explore trading him before next season.
Leo Carlsson and Cutter Gauthier will need massive new raises as RFAs this summer, not to mention Jackson LaCombe’s $9 million AAV officially kicking in. With that in mind, it feels wasteful to have a combined $9.57 million tied up for next season between Strome and Vatrano.
The Ducks should be able to find a taker for Strome ahead of next season, even with his recent struggles in mind, since he has only a year remaining on his deal and centers are scarce. It might require taking back some inefficient money back or attaching a mild sweetener, but the Ducks should feel confident they can execute a relatively painless exit if that’s the path they choose to pursue.
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