If the Vancouver Canucks could hit the “undo” button on one trade in the last decade or so, it would have to be the one that ultimately landed Dylan Guenther with the Utah Mammoth.

In a draft day trade in 2021, the then-Arizona Coyotes acquired the ninth overall pick from the Canucks, which the Coyotes used to select Guenther.

Five years later, “Gunner” has five goals and 11 points in 10 career games against the Canucks — including a goal and an assist in the Mammoth’s 7-4 win at Rogers Arena on Saturday.

He’s also two goals away from the 40 mark for the season. For context, Brock Boeser leads the Canucks in goals this season with 21.

The only things the Canucks have left from the deal are a pair of mediocre draft picks from flipping Conor Garland to the Columbus Blue Jackets and four more seasons of millions in dead cap space after buying Oliver Ekman-Larsson’s contract out two years later.

But Guenther’s two points on Saturday were only half of what the game’s leading scorer, Clayton Keller, contributed. Among his four points were three goals, lining up his third career hat trick and his first with the Utah franchise.

In true Keller fashion, he shrugged off his success without even cracking a smile.

“It feels good, for sure. Great plays by the guys on all of them, so, yeah, it’s good to score, for sure,” he said.

It was an all-hands-on-deck type of win for the Mammoth, with 13 different players recording points (including five of the six defensemen). Their third win in a row maintains their healthy lead in the wild card race, though they still haven’t officially clinched a playoff spot.

Through two seasons of existence, Utah remains perfect against Vancouver. The Philadelphia Flyers and the Buffalo Sabres are the only other teams that have yet to beat the league’s newest team, though each of them has only seen Utah four times, as opposed to Vancouver’s six.

How deep can you go?

Depth is a trait of virtually every Stanley Cup-winning team. The regular season is a grind and the playoffs are even more intense, so there are always injuries. The best teams find ways to overcome them.

With a few exceptions, the Mammoth have been largely fortunate this season on the injury front — unlike last year, when two of their top four defensemen missed more than half the season. But over the last week or so, guys have started to drop.

It began with Barrett Hayton, who collided with a teammate just seconds into the Mammoth’s March 24 game against the Edmonton Oilers and is now out on a week-to-week basis.

In Thursday’s game against the Seattle Kraken, Jack McBain took an Adam Larsson shot to the leg and is also out week to week. NHL Edge lists Larsson in the 92nd percentile in shot speed, so you can imagine how much that must have stung.

MacKenzie Weegar missed Saturday’s game, too, with what the Mammoth categorized as an “upper-body injury” expected to keep him out on a day-to-day basis.

It isn’t clear what caused Weegar’s injury, though he did take a fairly hard hit from Jacob Melanson with 9:58 on the clock in the third period on Thursday. That said, Weegar did finish that shift and played another three shifts afterwards.

But Utah’s depth guys are coming up big.

Liam O’Brien, who hadn’t played in precisely two months, scored what may have been the prettiest of his 13 career NHL goals Saturday, beating Nikita Tolopilo on a move to the backhand with speed.

“He’s such a great teammate, great guy, and he grinds every single day, so that’s, like, awesome to see,” Keller said of O’Brien.

Nick DeSimone filled Weegar’s spot on the back end, playing his first game since March 10. As always, he played as if he hadn’t missed a game all year.

He was on the ice for two goals against, but neither one was directly his fault — and he made up for it by being present for three Mammoth goals, registering an assist on one of them.

And with the likes of Dmitri Simashev, Kevin Rooney, Daniil But and a number of other capable role players on the outside looking in, the team is well-equipped to handle additional adversity that may come as it pushes for the playoffs.

“It’s not just having depth. It’s having guys you trust,” said Mammoth head coach André Tourigny after the game. “Both of those two guys (O’Brien and DeSimone), I trust them. They play the right way, they’re good pros, they stay ready. (No matter) how long they don’t play, they jump in.”

“We have a deep lineup and anyone that steps in is a great player and someone that knows our systems well and can contribute. O’Brien and DeSimone stepped in tonight and were great for us,” added Keller.

Goal of the game

Fans were treated to a number of beautiful goals on Saturday, but there’s one that stands out above the rest.

Kailer Yamamoto tipped a Logan Cooley shot-pass through his legs and into the net to tie the game early.

Keep in mind that Yamamoto is a guy who spent nearly all of last season in the minors and has watched a lot of games from the press box this year. It takes immense amounts of skill and confidence to pull off a move like that in an NHL game, and Yamamoto has plenty of both.

I said it on X and I’ll repeat it here: As long as players like Yamamoto are on the fringe of NHL rosters, I refuse the notion that expansion over-dilutes the game. More than ever before, the number of elite hockey players far exceeds the amount of NHL roster spots.

Yamamoto and plenty of others in similar positions deserve to be permanent, full-time NHLers with no fear of losing their jobs. Keep expanding.

SALT LAKE CITY — A repeat sex offender who was getting another chance at freedom is back behind bars after a civilian predator hunter group confronted him inside a halfway house in Salt Lake City.

Predator Poachers, the group run by Alex Rosen, baits online predators using “decoy accounts” set up to look like online profiles belonging to minors. They then travel from state to state confronting their “catches,” filming the confrontations to post content online, then calling local law enforcement in the hopes they’ll make an arrest.

At the end of March, Rosen and his team arrived in Utah and filmed confrontations with four men including Chase Quinton, 37, who had recently been granted parole and was living in a Utah Department of Corrections community correctional center, or halfway house.

As the KSL Investigators have reported, predator hunter groups present a unique challenge for law enforcement. Officials never want to encourage civilians getting involved in confronting potentially violent criminals. At the same time, Predator Poachers is regularly credited with stopping would-be sex crimes against children.

Special delivery

“I’ve got a package here for ya,” Rosen is heard in Predator Poachers’ video as Quinton responds to the lobby of the halfway house.

“He came down for his package, and in the lobby I interviewed him for like 15 minutes in hushed tones, and he admitted he was communicating to underage kids online and downloading apps he was not allowed to have on parole,” Rosen told the KSL Investigators.

During the confrontation, corrections officers can be seen walking through the background of the video. At one point, Rosen zooms in on the large Utah Department of Corrections logo on the wall behind Quinton, telling him, “Literally being in the Department of Corrections’ custody, you cannot be texting underage kids.”

After Quinton admitted to sending the messages on camera, Rosen involved a nearby corrections officer who immediately confiscated the parolee’s phone.

“It was, like, ‘We caught him in the halfway house!’ He was messaging two fake decoy accounts he believed were two underage kids,” Rosen told KSL. “And he wanted one of them to sneak out of their house in his mind and meet him.”

‘We would have caught it’

Quinton was returned to custody on a parole violation and is currently at the Salt Lake County Jail.

“He was going on a path that led him right back to where he belonged in this case, and that’s in prison,” said Spencer Turley, deputy executive director of the Utah Department of Corrections.

Turley said the department is grateful it was Predator Poachers — and not real children — on the other end of those messages.

“One of the things that we would ask is that they, rather than just outright confronting the person, is bring it to us first, so that we can then confront them, and we can address them,” said Turley. “Some of that reduces evidentiary challenges when we get to court and prosecutors start looking at prosecuting the case.”

In the video captured by Predator Poachers, Quinton is shown confessing to a corrections officer, “A week and a half ago I downloaded an app. I had gotten high on meth.”

Turley said Quinton had recently passed a drug test and that just days before the incident, corrections officers had searched his phone.

“If he’s out there actively engaging in sexual conversations online, I have no doubt we would have caught it,” said Turley.

Parole history

Quinton was convicted of his first sex offense in 2018. He went to a park with condoms in his coat pocket to meet a 13-year-old girl, but found law enforcement there instead.

After his first release on parole, he was convicted of a similar crime in Idaho in 2022.

The new conviction counted as a parole violation in the initial case, which prompted another stay in Utah’s prison system.

During a hearing in July last year, he tearfully asked Utah’s Board of Pardons and Parole for another chance.

“I do plan on doing better this time,” he said.

(Quinton) was going on a path that led him right back to where he belonged in this case, and that’s in prison.

–Spencer Turley, Utah Department of Corrections

According to a spokesperson for the parole board, Utah’s sentencing guidelines call for a 180-day sentence in response to a person’s first three parole violations. Quinton was most recently paroled in December, which meant the board kept him in custody longer than the standard amount of time after his additional conviction in Idaho.

“Your next hearing or release date is beyond the parole violation guideline because the board finds a public safety exception,” the board’s decision stated. “A public safety exception means the board finds that your conduct has or may present a substantial threat to public safety.”

Quinton spent three additional days in jail as a sanction in January, according to parole board documents.

“After he’d been out about two weeks, we did a phone check, and we found some adult pornography on his phone,” Turley explained.

While the content was not illegal, it did violate his release conditions. After spending a few days in jail, Quinton returned to the halfway house.

“One of the parameters of getting his phone back in that case was that he had to participate in sex offender treatment, and until his therapist felt like he was at a place to be responsible with the phone, we would not give it back to him,” said Turley.

He said the department gave Quinton back his phone about six weeks later, at the direction of his therapist.

What’s next?

“He’s not even the first sex offender we caught that day,” said Rosen.

Quinton is one of four men Rosen and his team confronted in Utah last month. Two of them were already convicted of sex crimes.

According to a police booking affidavit, David Burris was previously convicted of sexual abuse of a child. Rosen confronted him in Brigham City, where police arrested him.

“Utah’s prison system, judges and parole board need to go hard on these people,” said Rosen. “These sex offenders should not be available for us to catch.”

The KSL Investigators are still working to confirm law enforcement records related to the other two men.

Utah’s parole board has jurisdiction over Quinton through 2032 and will ultimately decide what happens to him next. Turley said the Department of Corrections will be recommending he serve additional prison time.

Turley said investigators are also performing forensic analysis on his phone to find out whether there were any real victims involved.

Have you experienced something you think just isn’t right? The KSL Investigators want to help. Submit your tip at investigates@ksl.com or 385-707-6153 so we can get working for you.