It’s not quite the dog days of the Vancouver Canucks’ offseason, but we’re getting there in a hurry.
On Friday, we dipped into the VIP mailbag to answer your offseason questions, but we received so many quality submissions from our subscribers that we wanted to double-dip and answer even more of them.
What does a successful 2026-27 season look like for the Canucks? How does Marco Rossi fit into this rebuild long-term? What does the Leo Carlsson situation tell us about big-picture rebuilding strategy in the cap growth era?
We get into all of that and more in part 2 of our Canucks offseason mailbag.
Note: Submitted questions may be edited for clarity and style.
NHL offer sheets are just business
Sean Gentille and Sean McIndoe
How do you see Marco Rossi’s future in Vancouver? What will be his role in the next year(s)? How long will he stay? — Markus O.
When Rossi returned from injury in late February, he produced 20 points in Vancouver’s final 25 games while quarterbacking a legitimately dangerous first power-play unit. That production, pro-rated over 82 games, would make Rossi a 66-point centre.
There’s upside for him to do even more than that, too, given how sparingly he was utilized at five-on-five (he played fewer five-on-five minutes than Teddy Blueger, absurdly, toward the tail end of Adam Foote’s one season as Vancouver’s head coach).
This season, I genuinely think the Canucks consider Rossi as their first-line centre. He had legitimate chemistry with Brock Boeser, and I think that left wing spot is probably the best place to park Jake DeBrusk next season, if he isn’t dealt this summer.
As for Rossi’s future, he has two seasons remaining on his bridge contract and will be an arbitration-eligible restricted free agent on the expiry of his contract. That’s suboptimal, of course, because Rossi is likely to get significant opportunity and produce over the next two seasons. He’ll probably have an enormous amount of leverage as a result of his projected role, productivity and the fact that he’s legitimately good.
That latter point is where this becomes tricky. Rossi is underrated and probably has more actual hockey value than he has exchange value. Because he’s undersized, however, the best way for his exchange value to catch his actual hockey value is for him to succeed in playing a big role for a team that wins in the playoffs, which he’s unlikely to have the opportunity to do in Vancouver.
Navigating this tension is the key for Vancouver in optimizing Rossi’s value. He’s a perfect piece for the rebuild for this season, and next, there’s no question about that, but the club will need to be careful about managing his third contract.
In my view, you probably need to make a proactive bet in either direction within the next 12 months.
You either strongly consider exploring the trade market for Rossi at the trade deadline in 2027 or in the offseason. Or you commit to signing him to a long-term extension in July 2027 as soon as he becomes extension eligible, on the theory that his leverage will only go up, and the market for productive top-six centres is only going to keep inflating as the cap continues to rise.
My lean, given that Rossi will be 27 when his third contract kicks in, and that Vancouver’s next great first-line centre might be a half-decade out from arriving in any event, is that the optimal strategy is to let Rossi succeed and produce in a top-of-the-lineup role this season. If you get a mega offer for him at the deadline, great, but in all likelihood, I suspect you’ll be better off attempting to take care of him proactively with a five- or six-year contract extension next summer and paying extra in salary and cap hit to avoid cumbersome no-trade and no-move protections on that deal.
With the Leo Carlsson offer sheet sending shock waves through the hockey world, what are the takeaways for the Canucks? Other than the obvious: sign your young players as early as possible? — Raphael F.
The big takeaway from the Carlsson situation is an unfortunate one from a Canucks perspective. After years of the Canucks charting a congenitally impatient course, living day to day and eschewing the sort of long-term planning required of championship teams, what the Carlsson offer sheet properly signals is the end of the patient rebuilding era in the NHL.
The evidence of this extends well beyond the Anaheim Ducks. You’re seeing teams grapple with this new reality in Chicago, where Connor Bedard remains unsigned (and is now injured), motivating the Blackhawks to attempt to short-circuit their ascendance with reckless trades for the likes of Bowen Byram. You’re seeing it too in San Jose, where Mike Grier has committed an unholy amount of cap and asset resources to bring in Jacob Trouba, Darnell Nurse, Mason Marchment and Kiefer Sherwood at inflated salaries over the past 12 months.
And you’re definitely seeing it in Anaheim, where the teams with the means and the cap space to do so have effectively picked at the Ducks’ carcass, both on the trade market (Mason McTavish and Olen Zellweger as buy lows), with offer sheets (Leo Carlsson) and with contractual settlements that Anaheim effectively got pushed into as a result of an offer sheet threat (Pavel Mintyukov).
There are effectively a couple of key forces that are conspiring to put win-now pressure on rebuilding teams at a faster clip than we’ve ever previously seen. The first is that, in an era of cap growth, better teams have the cap resources to make genuine runs at a rebuilding team’s best young players. The second is that, in an era of player empowerment, the patience of the NHL’s brightest young talents is going to be exhausted at a faster clip than ever.
The days in which you could expect an exceptional 21-year-old player to sign a team-friendly contract in a non-desirable locale with a non-contending team that’s poorly coached and hopefully managed are probably over. And good riddance.
Now teams are going to have to be able to offer players a world-class program, with great coaches and a compelling path to delivering championship-level competitive hockey every year lest their best young players begin to get cold feet and start plotting their way to Florida, Carolina, Vegas, Tampa Bay, or maybe Dallas if they’re feeling generous.
This isn’t to say that the stunning developments across the NHL over the past week-to-10 days should cause Ryan Johnson and company to throw their plans into the waste basket. Patience is still a virtue for a team that’s still accumulating.
The moment Vancouver lands its next star player in the draft, however, new Canucks management has to know that they’re on the clock. You can’t finish 31st, 31st and 31st over the course of the next Connor Bedard’s entry-level contract, and hope to have him commit to you on a team-friendly long-term extension. You can’t play hardball with Carlsson and every one of his friends, and hope that he won’t go about flexing his leverage when he hits the open market as a restricted player. You can’t have a coach that scratches Igor Chernyshov, San Jose’s second-best forward, in a must-win game with your playoff life on the line, then add a bunch of expensive, replacement-level defenders in trades and free agency and have that be enough to convince Macklin Celebrini to sign the day he first becomes extension-eligible because this team is ready to contend.
Those days are gone. The bar is raised. The era of patient rebuilding is over.
Will the Canucks losing the lottery be looked at as a blessing in disguise in the future? It allows them to be more patient and accumulate more assets without the pressure of having a McKenna-level star on their team and pressure from ownership and the fan base to win sooner? I’d rather they win the lottery in 2028 with a war chest already accumulated — Jason A.
I like this take; I largely agree with this take, but I think this 2027 NHL Draft is the end of a purple patch of starry elite talent coming into the league.
With top prospects like Bedard, McKenna and Celebrini, we’re talking about the sort of hockey prospect who’s famous within hockey circles by the time they’re 13 or 14. Young prodigies that absolutely crush their age group all the way up, and keep ramping up their abilities against competition at the major junior or collegiate level, cementing themselves as consensus first overall-level talents.
Within this run, too, we had a surprise prodigy in Matthew Schaefer. Schaefer was a top-end prospect, of course, the first selection at the OHL priority draft in 2023, but he wasn’t as widely viewed as being quite the same level of prospect as the three western forwards. That turns out to have been a miss. Schaefer is already a top-five defender on the planet, the most personable figure in the sport and a bona fide superstar by 19.
This run, which coincides, I might add, with when I started banging the “Canucks should be rebuilding” drum, is about to hit something of a lull.
Maddox Schultz is probably the best 2010-born player at the moment, and he had a sensational age-15 season for the WHL Regina Pats, but he’s generally thought of as an elite No. 1 level prospect for the 2028 draft, as opposed to being an outright prodigy. I’m not currently aware of any 2011-born phenoms that are even at the McKenna-type level (much less the Celebrini- or Bedard-type level) at the moment. You’ll hope for a Schaefer-like surprise emergence, but I’m not sure that the 2029 draft is going to be as loaded at the top end as the incredible run that we’re currently in that stretches from 2023-27.
By 2030, with a pair of prospective 2012-born phenoms in Kale Nicol and potentially RJ Celebrini on the horizon, we could be shaping up for another franchise-altering draft lottery by the conclusion of the decade. Right now, however, the 2027 draft with Landon DuPont (among a group of three other potential superstar-level prospect talents) feels like the last train bus out of town where generational No. 1 type picks are concerned.
It’s absolutely vital that the Canucks lose and lose often this season. No matter how fatalistic you are about the draft lottery, and whether the lottery balls will ever bounce Vancouver’s way, it’s essential for this rebuild that the Canucks get another top-three pick next June.
Would it make sense for the Canucks to go after Shane Wright? — Nick G.
I’m a big Shane Wright fan, and I see him as being a player with Sam Bennett-type glow-up potential.
I think he has the pace, skill and tenacity to be an elite second-line centre on a great team, but I don’t see him as having face-of-the-franchise level offensive upside at any point in his career.
In my mind, what the Canucks need is the latter, and what Wright offers is the former. So I don’t personally see a natural fit.
What does success look like to you in the 2026-27 season? Obviously, the goal is to finish toward the bottom of the standings, but that happened last season, and no one would call that a success. So, how do you balance a need to finish at the bottom with still wanting the season to be a success? — Graham K.
For me, a successful 2026-27 season for the Canucks involves the team making significant strides in terms of consistency of effort and structural organization, while still finishing in 32nd or 31st.
It involves the players that the Canucks selected at the 2027 NHL Draft making significant strides at the college or major junior level, representing their countries and making an impact at the World Juniors, and adding significant value to Vancouver’s holdings. Potentially — at least in Caleb Malhotra’s and Adam Novotný’s cases, or even in Brooks Rogowski’s case on AHL tryout — you’d like to see some of those players begin to push to break in at the professional level toward the tail end of next season.
It involves Zeev Buium and Tom Willander looking like far more credible top-four options than they did last season, and Braeden Cootes cementing himself as an everyday NHL-level player. It involves the organization monetizing several veterans on the trade market — whether that’s Filip Hronek, Elias Pettersson, Jake DeBrusk, or a player in the Drew O’Connor, Paul Cotter, Linus Karlsson tier — for valuable futures.
More than anything, it involves the Canucks delivering on their promise to continue to engage with the community, carrying themselves organizationally in a more self-confident, professional manner than we’ve grown accustomed to recently and maintaining a basic professional work ethic while continuing to accumulate future assets and future value in a mode consistent with what teams have accomplished during successful rebuilding periods.
