Avalanche acquire Brandon Duhaime from Wild

The Avalanche have acquired forward Brandon Duhaime from the Wild in exchange for a 2026 third-round pick, per a team announcement.

Duhaime, 26, had been drawing interest from other teams, including the Canucks, for the past few weeks. He’ll stay in the division, making him the third trade pickup for Colorado in the past two days.

In Colorado, Duhaime will fill the same role he has in Minnesota for the past three years — adding muscle to the fourth line. He has limited offensive upside, evidenced by his eight points in 62 games this season, but he’s an effective enough forechecker to shoulder slightly more ice time than the typical enforcer. 

He’s logged between 10 and 11 minutes per game in each of his three NHL seasons.

Duhaime is one of the more frequent hitters in the NHL — he’s one of 32 NHLers with more than 500 hits since 2021. He’s normally able to bolster his grit with solid two-way numbers, but that hasn’t been the case this season. His 44.1 CF% at even strength, as well as his 41.6 xGF%, are both career lows.

A pending UFA with a $1.1M cap hit, there was little reason for the Wild to hang onto Duhaime as they’ve again slipped to a sub-20% chance of making the playoffs, per MoneyPuck. 

Even if they were still solidly in the postseason race, there was enough demand for Duhaime on the market to make it wise to trade him and create roster space for youngsters such as Adam Beckman or Marat Khusnutdinov to make their season debuts.

Duhaime, along with the Avs’ other forward pickups this week, likely forces depth players like Joel Kiviranta and Chris Wagner to a press-box role come playoff time. Duhaime was one of five Wild skaters to appear in all of their 62 games to date.

The third-round pick is the first that Colorado has dealt from their 2026 arsenal. They added a second fifth-round pick in 2026 in Wednesday's Sean Walker trade.

Michael Russo of The Athletic was first to report that Duhaime was being traded. Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet was first to report that the Avalanche were acquiring Duhaime.