One of the busiest times for any store post-Christmas is when they start allowing gift returns. The lineups are always insane as shoppers look to return those unwanted items or toys that broke almost as soon as they started being used.

These returns are as much of a Christmas tradition as Boxing Day sales, hanging stockings and the World Juniors. Since most stores do not accept returns on Boxing Day, many of those returns will start happening this week.  

These shoppers are lucky. They can get their money back, or exchange the gift for another similar item that is much better. 

Fantasy hockey general managers don’t have that option. Your best alternative is to simply drop the player. You can’t undo a trade unless you can find a sucker GM who is feeling in the Christmas spirit. You can’t usually exchange the player for a better option as the waiver wire would have seen those better players scooped up already. 

But what if you could exchange these disappointing players for other options?

In the spirit of Christmas and gift returns, below are 10 players that you wish you could return to the store for a different model. 

10. Tyson Barrie

At 30 years old, Barrie could be considered a vintage model, but sometimes the next-generation model is just as efficient as the older version, but many have yet to realize it. Maybe it’s nostalgic to hold on to Barrie and hope he can get back to his 60-point days, but it might be time to exchange Barrie for Evan Bouchard. Barrie is getting all the man-advantage time, but Bouchard has more goals, points, shots, hits, blocked shots, PIM and plus-minus. How long will it take before the Oilers coaching staff starts inserting Bouchard onto the power play, and thereby further reducing the value of Barrie?

9. Nikita Kucherov

This toy comes with a high price, but it’s broken for most of the year. Sure, for a couple of months every spring, it’s the best toy in the world and becomes the envy of all your friends. Then you spend the summer basking in the light of the special trophy it helped win. But it breaks down again come the fall and is useless for a while. You’re very hesitant to exchange him since he may start working again in the new year. However, if you could get another toy that works for most of the year and still puts up excellent numbers, you have to jump at the opportunity. 

8. Cole Caufield

This is a case of the shiny new toy that looked great in the box. Your friends all talked up how awesome the toy was going to be, even though no one had ever seen it in action. Once you took it out of the packaging and started to use it, you realized it’s not as much fun as you were hoping and it lost all of its value. It also looks a lot smaller than you thought it looked in the commercials. You even ditched it to your little brother for a while. You’re hoping you can exchange this neophyte for almost any other hot new toy, but Lucas Raymond is the best of the bunch. 

7. Spencer Knight

Maybe this is the type of toy that gets better with age, but for now, he’s not worth the high price you paid for it back in early October. Knight is getting upstaged by an older model that most predicted wouldn’t be very good. However, you would easily exchange Knight for Sergei Bobrovsky for at least the rest of the season. Maybe you’ll try the Knight model again next October to see if the developers have worked the bugs out of the system. 

6. Taylor Hall

The Mr. Potato Head of toys. He breaks apart easily but you can just Frankenstein him back together any way you see fit. He always looks like so much fun when someone else has him, but just like the Toy Story movies, he’s more of a secondary character instead of one of the main guys. You are hoping to trade him in for someone like Jesse Puljujarvi, someone who has missed a lot of games the last few seasons, but for different reasons. 

5. Tyler Seguin

For this return, it’s to the point where you don’t play with it as much as you used to, and you don’t trust it to play with your other top toys. Instead, it’s stuck playing with other players on a different line. You hope you would be able to exchange him for almost any other player available, but it’s possible the store wouldn’t even take him back as he’s too damaged. 

4. Semyon Varlamov

You were willing to be patient with this one, but it was broken as soon as you unwrapped it. His job has been usurped by Ilya Sorokin and now his value has dropped. It makes one wonder why he was so popular a few months back, when he was a top-10 goalie pick. Since missing six games with an undisclosed injury, he has one win in eight games and only three quality starts. Could you exchange him for Sorokin? Probably not, but it couldn’t hurt to try (you could point to Sorokin’s two wins in his last 10 games if you need to try to convince the other owner). 

3. Jeff Petry

This is one of those toys that hasn’t worked properly since October, but you don’t know why. Everything seems like it should be working, but it just never does what it was hyped to do. It still hits and blocks shots, but it doesn’t shoot like it used to. It doesn’t score and doesn’t like playing if one side has an extra toy. This is one gift that you can’t even exchange. You have to stick it on the shelf and hope it miraculously fixes itself one day. 

2. Jakob Chychrun

How can one of the hottest toys of last season be such a dud this year? You’re always a year late getting the latest models, and now none of the other kids want anything to do with this edition. They also laugh at anyone who still has this toy in their collection. They would much rather have an older model in Drew Doughty. Despite not being as mobile as the newer generation model, Doughty has been the much better option this season. 

1. Darcy Kuemper

One of the most popular toys back in September/October (his sales only trailed only Andrei Vasilevskiy and Robin Lehner), his owners keep waiting for him to prove that he was worth such a high draft pick. He’s missed a few games due to an upper-body injury and then was in Covid protocol just before the league shut down. Even when he is in the lineup, he picks up wins because of the team in front of him, but the rest of his numbers aren’t great. Even though he looks to be healthy now, you can’t trust him not to break down again.