SEATTLE — Relationships are complicated. Except for the relationship between Brady Tkachuk and the Ottawa Senators’ fan base, which was focused in sharp simplicity this week by the player’s return to bedlam — one smirking black hat wading into a sea of white ones.

The relationship between Quinn Hughes and fans of the Vancouver Canucks should be much more nuanced; his unprecedented achievements and devotion to the franchise during his first six seasons in one of the National Hockey League’s most challenging markets weighed against the American’s refusal to commit to a contract extension and management’s subsequent decision 10 months ago to trade him to the Minnesota Wild.

A nightly human highlight reel of otherworldly edgework and puck-handling, Hughes was not only the best defenceman in Canucks history but, given his immediate rise to stardom — winning the Norris Trophy at age 24 — is probably the franchise’s best ever player, period.

But he was also captain of a Canucks team that former president Jim Rutherford trumpeted for its dysfunction. At the end of last year’s cataclysmic season, Rutherford also said Hughes wouldn’t have re-signed under any circumstances. The head of hockey operations essentially drove a steamroller back and forth over Hughes until he was flattened like Wile E. Coyote.

Hughes also committed the unpardonable sin of helping Team USA beat Canada in the gold-medal game at the Olympics, a couple of months after his trade back to America.

Already widely vilified online in Vancouver, where anything Hughes-negative makes great clickbait, the defenceman from Michigan (via Toronto) will be greeted by a degree of hostility Sunday when he steps on the ice at Rogers Arena from the visitors’ bench for the first time.

“I think that part of the reason I love Vancouver is the passion, and I don't take anything personal,” Hughes told a couple of print reporters Saturday morning in Seattle, where the Wild were preparing to play the Kraken in the first half of back-to-back weekend games. “How I'm received tomorrow won't affect how I feel about........

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