The career path of Victor Mancini is really a wild one.

He started in the USHL before heading to the Swedish Junior ranks for his 17-year-old season in 2019-20, an unusual move for an American-born prospect. That was his first year of draft eligibility, but Mancini went unselected.

Due to some complications with COVID scheduling, Mancini split the 2020-21 season between the Swedish Juniors and the USHL. His game progressed despite the disruptions, and he was even named captain of Frolunda Jr. while there, but he still went undrafted in his second year of eligibility.

Mancini joined the NCAA ranks with U. of Nebraska-Omaha for 2021-22 and had a steady, if quiet, freshman campaign that finally culminated in him being drafted as a double over-ager at 159^th overall by the New York Rangers. That’s deep into the fifth round.

From there, Mancini obviously rounded out his game, though it’s hard to tell that from his statline. He went from five points to eight points to 10 through three seasons with Nebraska-Omaha, which is why what came next was so surprising.

Mancini signed his ELC after the 2023-24 campaign and immediately joined the Hartford Wolf Pack of the AHL for seven regular season games and 10 more in the playoffs.

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, Mancini attended his first NHL training camp with the Rangers in September of 2024 and cracked the opening night roster. Mancini only stayed up for 15 games before being sent back down to Hartford, but he managed five points in those 15 games, outstripping his production from any point in his NCAA career.

Then, in January 2025, Mancini was sent to Vancouver, along with Filip Chytil and a first-round pick, in exchange for JT Miller, Erik Brännström, and Jackson Dorrington.

Given Mancini’s seemingly meteoric rise and inherent value as a large-bodied RD who can skate, many were surprised that Mancini was even made available by the Rangers.

From going overseas as a teenager to being passed over twice in the draft to making the NHL out of his first training camp to being traded for an All-Star, it’s been quite an odyssey for Mancini already. But as with Odysseus, the most important part of the story is where he ends up in the end. Mancini has struggled to maintain that same upward momentum since arriving in Vancouver, and while he’s taken a couple of star turns for Abbotsford, including on that 2024-25 championship run, he’s yet to establish himself as a true nightly option for the Big Canucks.

And although Mancini is just 24 years old, the ongoing youth movement in Vancouver means that he is quickly running out of time to make that definitive impact.

The 2026-27 season really has to be the one in which Mancini stakes his claim on the NHL. That’s both his goal and his expectation, but even within that narrow view, there are a few differing levels of success he can achieve.

It’s not really enough to just say that Mancini needs to become a full-time NHLer this season. Yes, he definitely needs to beat his previous career high of 24 games played, but it’s also more than that. Mancini averaged just 13:44 a night for the Canucks last year and was clearly used as a fill-in, not a piece the team was building for the long term. That has to change in 2026-27.

The presence of fellow RD Luke Schenn on the roster gives Mancini a clear goal. As much as everyone in this fanbase loves Schenn, the truth is that he’s slowly but surely been aging out of being a true every-night NHL defender. If Mancini is going to be a full-time NHL player himself, he’s essentially going to have to look as good or better than Schenn on a regular basis, and ideally start to push Schenn out of the lineup on a more regular basis. If Schenn and Mancini are splitting time, or if Mancini can actually surpass Schenn on the depth chart by mid-season, it’ll mean the kind of success that can be built upon.

This is an admittedly wordy way to say this, but we think it fits. As we said in the previous section, becoming a full-time NHL option by equaling or surpassing Schenn is Step One in the Planchini. Step Two has to involve increasing his overall impact on the lineup, especially in a way that puts him back into the big picture of the long-term rebuild plan.

That would probably have to mean, at the very least, that Mancini makes more of an impact than all the other pieces remaining from the Miller trade, or in other words, re-establishes himself as the centrepiece of that return. That means outperforming Chytil, which is something that may happen by default depending on Chytil’s injury recovery. But it also means outperforming Drew O’Connor, the only piece left on the roster acquired through flipping the first that accompanied Mancini to Vancouver.

And, honestly, O’Connor is a great bar for Mancini to clear. O’Connor seems locked in to make a strong middle-six contribution on the front end for the Canucks. If Mancini can say the same or better on the back-end, he’ll have moved up the depth chart considerably and moved up in the long-term estimation of Canucks management.

This section is pretty simple.

Mancini already has 104 AHL games under his belt between regular season and playoffs, and that should be enough seasoning for a 24-year-old. But because of that aforementioned meteoric rise, Mancini still has waiver-exempt status and will until he’s played 15 more NHL games.

Suffice it to say that if the Canucks are sending Mancini down to Abbotsford before he’s played 15 games this season, he’s disappointed to a considerable extent.

Unless we’re talking an injury and a temporary conditioning stint, the goal has to be for Mancini to spend zero time in Abbotsford this year, and ideally for his time in that league to have come to a firm conclusion.

That said, a situation in which Mancini passes that 15-game threshold and remains up with the Canucks, but spends most of his time in the pressbox – presumably sitting in lieu of Schenn – would also have to be considered a disappointment.

That’s why we say that simply being in the NHL full-time in 2026-27 is not enough for Mancini. He needs to make a measurable impact beyond simply just being there.