Four wins. Eight points out of a playoff spot with 22 games to go is an abyss. It’s Matt Damon marooned on Mars, looking toward Earth. But it’s still only four wins.

“It looks like we’re not going to make the playoffs this year,” Vancouver Canucks general manager Jim Benning said during a break in trade discussions this week. “But in my heart, I really believe if we’d had Brandon Sutter the whole year and Alex Edler didn’t get hurt, we’d be right there. We’re four wins out from being in the playoffs.”

If there were do-overs in the National Hockey League, the Canucks would have a pile of choices.

They’ve lost nine games this season in which they led after two periods. Their third-period comeback in Thursday’s 5-3 win against the porous Ottawa Senators — “they played like we did earlier in the season,” one Canucks player said — was only Vancouver’s third.

The Canucks’ record of 14-2-7 when leading into the third period represents a win rate of .609, easily the worst in the NHL. The league median is .864. Those nine blown games by the Canucks are one more than the top eight third-period teams have combined to lose.

It’s 11 points Vancouver is not getting back, although about now the Canucks would settle for half.

Even with serious injuries to Sutter and Edler and others, the brutal winter schedule the Canucks agreed to, the feast-or-famine attack, the lousy power play and open casting call that has seen Vancouver try 36 different players this season, it’s still those games they kicked away in the third period that have left them here. Four wins out.

With the NHL trade deadline at noon Pacific time on Monday, four wins change a lot.

Sure, Benning would probably still be trading winger Radim Vrbata and trying to move defenceman Dan Hamhuis, whose no-trade clause entitles him to decide if and where he goes. But if the Canucks were holding the final playoff spot in the Western Conference instead of growing potatoes on Mars, and knowing both Sutter (broken jaw) and Edler (broken leg) should be healthy in another month, Benning would be more aggressive in trade discussions, possibly even adding a player at a bargain price.

And he probably wouldn’t have included lineup regulars like defenceman Matt Bartkowski and centre Linden Vey on the Canucks’ seven-player sell list that made it from the NHL general managers’ in-house website to Bob McKenzie’s Twitter feed this week.

As the TSN insider reported, the Canucks are open for business. They haven’t been this open for business since Mike Keenan got his hands on the controls and made 11 trades in three months in 1998 and dealt away just about everyone except Mark Messier.

In the middle of a rebuild, with his team eight points out, Benning has to sell.

The question, as we’ve posed before, is what, if anything, can he get from his “assets?”

Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Washington and a couple of others are interested in Hamhuis, but the 33-year-old defenceman has the negotiated right to stay in Vancouver, which is home.