The Vancouver Canucks hit rock bottom last season, on and off the ice. 2026-27 will be another challenging, painful season, but for once, that’s finally by design.
After years of futilely chasing shortcuts in desperate attempts to squeak into the playoffs, the Canucks are finally embracing a rebuild under the guidance of new GM Ryan Johnson and the Sedin brothers.
Success won’t be measured in the standings — the hope is progress from young players, fewer blowouts and better vibes, while still finishing low enough to secure a high draft pick.
Can the Sedins change the Canucks’ culture?
Sean Gentille and Thomas Drance
The projection
It’s no secret that this is going to be a tough year for the Canucks given the massive drop the franchise went through last season and the subsequent loss of talent. That’s for the best; the Canucks are set up well this year to make the most of that as one of the few teams locked into a rebuild. Vancouver walks away with a top-three pick in 45 percent of simulations — exactly what’s needed after selecting Caleb Malhotra at No. 3 this summer.
The forecast would be much more dire, though, if not for the team hiring Manny Malhotra as the new head coach. He’s an X-factor in the simple sense that he can’t be nearly as bad as Adam Foote was.
The big question
Can Manny Malhotra coax out a more competitive team?
Nobody is fooling themselves into thinking the Canucks are going to contend for a playoff spot this season, but the biggest driver for Vancouver’s increased competitiveness and internal improvement could be the change behind the bench.
Malhotra is a very highly regarded coach — he’s extremely prepared and detail-oriented, a thoughtful, skilled communicator, and won the Calder Cup with Abbotsford in 2025. However, the idea of a Malhotra bump has more to do with Foote’s ineptitude as a head coach rather than Malhotra being the next Scotty Bowman.
Foote was dealt a tough hand with injuries, the drama of the Quinn Hughes situation and the club’s dreadful center depth, but even with that context in mind, his coaching decisions and impact were highly questionable.
Foote introduced a new-look swarm-like defensive zone system which prioritized outnumbering attackers down low to aggressively kill plays early. Instead, it led to pure disorganization and disastrous breakdowns. Two Canucks players often overcommitted to the puck carrier, leaving massive holes in dangerous parts of the defensive zone. Vancouver went from ranking top-10 in limiting five-on-five shots and expected goals against under Rick Tocchet in 2024-25 to bottom-three in virtually every defensive category under Foote last season.
Every defenseman except Filip Hronek looked worse under Foote, including Hughes, who looked surprisingly ordinary and made more defensive blunders than usual before being traded in mid-December.
While Foote was set up to fail with a mediocre roster, he made a bad situation even worse with some head-scratching personnel decisions up front, too. Evander Kane was stapled on the top line with Elias Pettersson for bafflingly long stretches when it was clear early on that Kane couldn’t hang as a serviceable top-six option. Linus Karlsson, who led the team in five-on-five goals and points scored in addition to driving some of the best two-way underlying metrics of all Canucks forwards, somehow ranked 12th among the team’s forwards in average ice time (12:31).
Malhotra should modestly raise the defensive floor. The Canucks will likely still concede a lot of high-danger chances because the roster is so weak, but they shouldn’t be as porous, especially with all the backdoor east-west passes they surrendered last season. If the team reduces the number of those tap-ins it gives up, it’s conceivable that the goaltending, which underperformed on paper, could deliver better results as well. It’s also reasonable to believe Malhotra will be able to unlock a bit more out of the club’s young talent and veterans alike.
Ultimately, though, it’s possible — and perhaps even most likely — that the Canucks will be significantly more competitive under Malhotra without damaging their odds of finishing at the bottom and landing Landon DuPont next summer.
For starters, last year’s Canucks team wasn’t just bad; they were hopeless. Vancouver finished last in the NHL standings by a whopping 14 points and had a minus-100 goal differential. In other words, the baseline they’re starting from is already so far behind every other team in the NHL.
Second, the roster Malhotra is working with is worse by Net Rating than Foote’s was last season. Management prioritized high character over needle-moving on-ice ability in acquiring veterans like Brendan Gallagher and Luke Schenn this summer, which is wise for a rebuilding team looking to fix its culture.
Third, many of last season’s bottom-feeders made aggressive moves to improve their roster, widening the talent gap between them and Vancouver. The 31st-place Chicago Blackhawks took a massive swing on Bowen Byram. The 30th-place New York Rangers acquired Pavel Dorofeyev, Sean Durzi and Marcus Pettersson. The 28th-place Toronto Maple Leafs signed Darren Raddysh, rebuilt their bottom-six depth and added Gavin McKenna.
All of this is to say: Yes, the Canucks should improve under Malhotra, but a bottom-three finish is still the most likely outcome.
The wild card
How high can Zeev Buium climb in his second season?
The pedigree and raw talent are there for Buium. He could still be the next Erik Karlsson or Morgan Rielly. But to tap into that potential and help Buium become the best version of himself, development is going to be absolutely crucial this year.
Buium has shown flashes in an environment as dysfunctional as Vancouver. But he still has to find ways to take over offensively on a consistent basis, even when he doesn’t have a ton of forward support. He also has to show he can run a power play, which was a struggle last season.
Then comes the challenge of shoring up play in his own zone, and that was a weak point before Vancouver traded for him. He isn’t the first up-and-coming offensive defenseman to have defensive deficiencies; it’s a growing trend among his peers across the league. But if he doesn’t start progressing past them, it could signal he’s trending toward the lower end of his range of outcomes. Maybe it’s just a step down to the Jamie Drysdale tier. But the Ethan Bear or Erik Brännström trajectory is still a possibility.
The strengths
After trading Hughes, Kiefer Sherwood, Conor Garland, Tyler Myers, Marcus Pettersson and Nils Höglander over the last several months, this is a very weak, hollowed-out roster. There aren’t a whole lot of strengths to highlight.
Player values aren’t static, though, and this is where the coaching change could lead to several players outperforming their projection. Of the 58 new bench bosses hired by NHL teams since 2017, Foote had the second-worst impact on the projected Net Rating of the players he coached in his first year as Vancouver’s head coach.
It’s conceivable Buium, Willander and Elias Pettersson (the defenseman) could take notable steps forward in a more structured environment.
Up front, there’s reason to be cautiously optimistic that veteran top-six wingers Brock Boeser and Jake DeBrusk will offer sturdier two-way results after this coaching change. Both of them posted the worst underlying numbers of their career last season; Boeser drove just 40.5 percent of expected goals during his five-on-five shifts and DeBrusk’s xG share was only 44.9 percent. Neither one is, of course, a prolific play-driver or a defensive savant, but before last season, they weren’t liabilities and could at least hold their own.
One of the surprising strengths for the Canucks down the stretch last season was their red-hot power play. In the final 30 games, Vancouver clicked at 28.6 percent, the third-best rate in the NHL. Those results were likely inflated to some degree by shooting-percentage luck, but their process was also real and sustainable, as their power play generated shots per 60 at the 10th-best rate in the league in those final 30 games.
Marco Rossi’s success as a playmaker on the left flank was one of the biggest catalysts for that power-play success. Rossi was a net-front player rather than a flank creator with a lot of puck touches on Minnesota’s power play, so this success from the left half-wall was a tad surprising, though it’s worth remembering he was an excellent playmaker in junior. Nobody’s expecting Vancouver’s power play to be elite next season, but it will be fascinating to see if it can keep clicking at a respectable rate.
Further down the roster, Vancouver has enough forward depth that its fourth line should be passable. Paul Cotter was a savvy free-agent pick-up at a low price, Max Sasson has lights-out speed and chipped in with 13 goals last season, and Aatu Räty could be a solid 4C.
The weaknesses
There are holes pretty much everywhere, but the Canucks’ biggest weakness is their lack of high-end star talent. Nearly every NHL team has at least a player or two who can single-handedly take over in any given game, but Vancouver doesn’t have a single skater who fits that criteria.
That brings us to the elephant in the room: Elias Pettersson (the forward). The chances of Pettersson rebounding to the 100-point superstar he used to be are very slim. His skating speed has declined significantly from his peak, which is evident in both the eye test and NHL Edge tracking data. That sluggish pace has devastated his ability to drive zone entries and shots off the rush, both down 35-40 percent compared to 2022-23, according to Corey Sznajder’s tracking data. He doesn’t have first-line-caliber wingers who could spark his offense. It’s also been two and a half years since we’ve seen the dynamic, game-breaking version of him — long enough that hope is dwindling.
With all that said, though, perhaps Malhotra can squeeze a bit more out of Pettersson than Foote could. Last season, Pettersson was tasked with the toughest matchups and had the most defensive-zone starts of his career. That was partly because Filip Chytil and Teddy Blueger’s injuries completely decimated the Canucks’ center depth to the point where Lukas Reichel, a fringe NHL forward who’s better on the wing, was getting extended time as Vancouver’s second-line center.
Now, with Rossi in the fold, the Canucks have another bona fide top-six pivot who can take some of that pressure off Pettersson and perhaps free him up for a bit more favorable usage. It probably still won’t be enough for him to perform at the level of a true No. 1 center – and certainly not compared to the other No. 1 forwards in the NHL – but it is something to keep an eye on.
Pettersson, Rossi, DeBrusk, Boeser and Karlsson are all useful players, but if they’re your team’s five best forwards, you’re in trouble; all of them rank below the 20th percentile relative to their league-wide slot.
Hronek had an excellent 2025-26 season and proved he’s a lot more than just a Hughes merchant with his top-notch two-way performance. He’s closer to being a strong No. 2 than he is a bona fide No. 1 defenseman, though.
Trading Marcus Pettersson for a first-round pick and then signing Jamie Oleksiak to replace his second-pair role was a really smart rebuilding move by Canucks management. In the short term, though, it is a clear downgrade, as Oleksiak is closer to third-pair quality rather than top-four-caliber.
Vancouver’s goaltending is also an unknown. Thatcher Demko has shown flashes of being one of the best goaltenders in the world when he’s healthy, but he’s constantly picked up injuries over the last two years. He was shut down in January for hip surgery, and GM Ryan Johnson was non-committal about whether Demko would be ready for training camp when speaking to Postmedia’s Patrick Johnston. Even if he is ready for the start of the season, it’s fair to be skeptical about his ability to stay healthy. Behind Demko, Kevin Lankinen struggled with the workload of being a full-time starter in a challenging defensive environment.
The best case: 85 points
Infinitely more watchable thanks to strong structure, a return to form from Elias Pettersson and a breakthrough from Zeev Buium. The Canucks flirt with the playoffs in a weak Pacific Division.
The worst case: 55 points
A new coach isn’t enough to solve last year’s problems, and roster issues cascade into an unwatchable finish that only lands third-last. The Canucks drop two spots in the lottery again to add insult to injury.
The bottom line
The rebuilding Canucks have a balancing act ahead of them. This team has to lose enough to net a top draft pick, which looks very doable with this roster. But at the same time, Vancouver has to progress enough internally to make sure this isn’t a complete lost season.
References
How the model adjusts for context
Understanding projection uncertainty
Resources
All Three Zones Tracking by Corey Sznajder
Read the other 2026-27 season previews here.