After Vancouver Canucks’ season of failure, rebuilding is the only option. Now, what comes next?
VANCOUVER — On the night the Vancouver Canucks closed out the home portion of the least successful season in franchise history, they managed to put on a rare good show at Rogers Arena.
The outcome, a 4-3 overtime win over the Los Angeles Kings, was at least something fun for the fans to enjoy at the merciful conclusion of a memorably miserable year. A season that saw the Canucks trade their captain, Quinn Hughes, and marked the start of a second unintentional rebuild in less than a decade.
The setup to this season was quasi-existential for the franchise: Win for Quinn. To that end, Vancouver handed out nearly $200 million in total contractual commitments to veteran players like Brock Boeser, Kevin Lankinen, Thatcher Demko, Marcus Pettersson, Drew O’Connor and Conor Garland between January and July 2025. The team dealt significant futures — including a New York Rangers first-round pick — in trades designed to supplement this roster. A roster that will finish last in the NHL this season by a country mile.
It’s one thing to win fewer games in regulation than Vancouver did during the nightmarish 2021 pandemic-abbreviated season, or during the hapless expansion era in the early 1970s.
It’s another thing to do so after committing a reckless amount of money to a core group that had already demonstrated that both their floor and ceiling were concerningly low.
On Tuesday night, however, it wasn’t all so grim. The defining image of the game was a late second period shift in which Zeev Buium — the key piece that Vancouver acquired in the Hughes trade — combined with Kirill Kudryavtsev, Nils Höglander and Elias Pettersson, the forward, for a gorgeous heavy shift, filled with dynamic movement and pinpoint passing and a highlight reel Buium goal to level the score 3-3.
It was a shift during which Buium’s ability to control the game and his authority as an attacking presence from the back end, those same traits which made him the most dominant force in college hockey as a prospect, were unmistakable.
It was a shift that served as a reminder of why fans voted Buium the Pavel Bure Award winner on Tuesday night, recognizing him as the team’s most exciting player for the 2025-26 season.
There is, of course, a tell in that. Something of a backhanded compliment, given how this season unfolded.
Buium’s goal on Tuesday was lovely. It was also his first tally in 25 games.
That he could endure a goal drought of that length and magnitude and was still voted by the fans as Vancouver’s most exciting player is less of an accomplishment than it is an indication of just how much distance this franchise has to travel back to relevance.
Vancouver has, at most, only just broken ground on its rebuilding effort. Players like Buium, Tom Willander and Liam Öhgren may be building blocks, perhaps, but the reality is that this process is beginning without any surefire cornerstone pieces in place.
That will change, inevitably, not as a byproduct of the organization’s own competence or success, but as a result of the scale of its failure.
That failure, in fact, far more so than the development of Buium, Willander, Öhgren, Linus Karlsson, or whoever else you’d choose, is the true and paradoxical silver lining of this Canucks season.
There can be no argument anymore. This season was too miserable, and this club was too far below any reasonable standard to deny the long-evident reality that a full, disciplined rebuild is now an absolute necessity.
It’s painful, of course, to fail at this level and frequency in the NHL. This magnitude of failure, however, can serve as a disinfectant.
Not only is it clarifying for the organization, but it also grants the club access to the sort of franchise-altering players that will be required to construct the next great Canucks team.
That access, of course, isn’t guaranteed. The whims of the NHL’s draft lottery balls are cruel, as Canucks fans have learned repeatedly over the years.
Having the opportunity, however, to draft one of those select group of special players that only ever exist at the top of the draft order and who have the potential to meaningfully shape outcomes in this league is a far more tangible source of hope for the Canucks and their fans than the superficial “Anything can happen” stuff that this club has too frequently peddled over the years.
In the NHL system, failure is the most potent path to salvation. Given the talent level of this Canucks roster, how long it may take to intelligently disentangle the franchise from its many inefficient bets to aging players with no-trade and no-move protection, and the composition of the Western Conference, this dynamic of sustained failure is likely locked in now for several years to come.
That dynamic may seem grim, but it’s a good thing. It genuinely represents the best position that the Canucks have occupied in years.
For a decade now, every moment of progress has been met with rapid and shocking regression. The reversals have been dramatic, too, and have occurred almost immediately. From the bubble run to “Bruce There It Is” to the rate at which the 2023-24 Pacific Division-winning Canucks came undone due to petty squabbles and internal grievances, there’s a well-founded feeling among fans that nothing has gone right for this franchise.
With the future of head coach Adam Foote and general manager Patrik Allvin understandably in question at the conclusion of this season, the ghosts of a run of poor hires — not to mention the deeply dysfunctional process that accompanied Jim Benning’s long overdue dismissal — add a sense of unease about the franchise’s ability to manage what’s next.
When the season ends later this week, it’ll be critical for the Canucks — whether that’s ownership or Rutherford leading the charge — to project clarity and decisiveness.
There can be no more excuses, no more dissembling about hybrid retools, or changing the culture late in a historically dismal season, or half-baked declarations that the club has actually been rebuilding for several years now.
If Rutherford is going to move this franchise forward, the Canucks are going to have to own where they are. It’s going to take some level of accountability for the Canucks to make the case to an uneasy, skeptical market that this time the franchise has a better understanding of what it will take to build a credible, contending team over the long run. That this time, the journey will be worth it.
Behind the bench, the club faces a relatively straightforward decision. Between the injuries, the off-ice drama and a staff of assistant coaches that lacked both weight and experience, Foote was dealt a difficult hand in his first Canucks season.
Even with that context considered, Foote’s Canucks were far too disorganized. Their work rate didn’t leap over the bar of acceptable often enough, and the confidence of this team seemed fragile. The deployment decisions were too difficult to make sense of, and Vancouver’s youngest players didn’t show meaningful signs of progress throughout the year.
If the club waffles on what should be a tap-in decision to replace Foote, that would be a bad process indicator at the outset of this crucial offseason.
It’s more complicated with Allvin, but only slightly. Allvin, a career amateur scout, has put in the travel and the hours to scout the apex of the 2026 draft class. The Canucks are likely to seek a new voice in the general manager’s seat after this season, but the precise shape and timing of what that looks like appears to be up in the air with one game remaining in the regular season.
These aren’t easy decisions to make or easy situations to manage. It’s on the organization and on Rutherford to find elegant, sensible solutions at a reasonable pace to avoid the sort of dysfunctional circumstances that we witnessed when Canucks ownership mishandled the post-Benning transition by hiring Bruce Boudreau prior to identifying their president of hockey operations.
Outside of the future of Rutherford, Allvin and Foote, the big offseason questions that surround the Canucks aren’t altogether that consequential. The stakes are relatively low for a team with no realistic route to being competitive, even in the mushy middle sense of the term.
The results of the draft lottery will matter enormously, of course, as does finding creative ways to shed some of the club’s exorbitant commitments to depreciating veteran assets while accumulating meaningful futures.
The specifics, however, of the player personnel machinations are secondary to whether or not the Canucks can work through what they want this organization to be, who they want to lead it and how the franchise will go about executing on that philosophy — whatever shape it takes.
Given the passion level in this market, a double-edged sword to be sure, this is a team that should be able to attack this rebuilding project with significant aggression. There is financial might that can be brought to bear in the service of accumulating futures — and out-accumulating 31 other NHL teams — during an era of cap growth. This is the moment to invest in something world-class. Something aspirational.
The competitive pressure is off this team in the near future. The market wants a rebuild, and is savvy about what that entails. The Canucks have the latitude and patience from fans to be ambitious and rethink what this organization represents.
A lack of direction and investment has hobbled this franchise over the past 15 years, and rebuilding this organization needs to start by reversing those trends. Canucks ownership should get some credit for spending to the level of the salary cap upper limit every season, but that was easier to do in the flat cap era, and in any event, there’s more to investing in excellence than spending inefficiently on player personnel.
What needs to be rebuilt now in Vancouver goes well beyond the roster, prospect system and draft capital.
The rebuild must first focus on rebuilding trust with fans and re-establishing some organizational standard of excellence.
Without that, the product on the ice will continue to stagnate and fail, the way the Canucks did this season.
