After two weeks of watching some of the best hockey of all time, fans of the Vancouver Canucks are about to experience one of the worst comedowns ever.

The 2026 Olympics were fantastic, even if they ended in heartbreak for Canadians as Team Canada fell short in overtime to Team USA in the gold medal game in both the men’s and women’s tournaments. The best players in the world played their hearts out for their respective countries, resulting in gorgeous goals, ridiculous saves, and all kinds of edge-of-your-seat thrills.

How can you go back to watching the last-place Canucks after that?

Let’s be honest, there are plenty of reasons to stop watching the Canucks. This has been a rough season from every possible angle. At times like these, bandwagon fans start to sound a lot more logical: only cheering for the team when they’re actually good kind of makes sense.

But there are some good reasons to continue watching the rest of the Canucks’ 2025-26 season. Let’s look at five of them:

With injuries to multiple veterans and more or less of a commitment to a rebuild, the Canucks are a fairly young team. Some of those youths might even be part of the future of the team.

Zeev Buium is a potential stud. Tom Willander has shown flashes of why the Canucks picked him 11th overall. Liam Öhgren has been a pleasant surprise since coming over in the Quinn Hughes trade. Linus Karlsson is fresh and exciting enough to make you forget he’s already 26 years old.

Nikita Tolopilo has arguably outplayed Kevin Lankinen and should get more starts down the stretch. And we might see more call-ups from the Abbotsford Canucks, though Jonathan Lekkerimäki’s season-ending shoulder surgery puts a damper on how exciting that can be.

At some point, Adam Foote might even give Aatu Räty a real opportunity to prove himself, maybe once a few more veterans get traded. Maybe.

Marco Rossi’s first eight games with the Canucks after the Hughes trade didn’t exactly leave a strong impression of him as a player. Rossi was already playing through an injury and had just two points in eight games before missing nearly two months of action.

But Rossi is back to 100 per cent and ready to return to the lineup, giving him a second chance at a first impression.

Rossi has produced at a top-six level in the past and is two years younger than Linus Karlsson. As a key piece of the Hughes trade, Rossi should, in theory, be a major part of the Canucks’ future. It will be interesting to see how a fully healthy Rossi can play in a Canucks jersey.

Let’s be honest: you want to know just how bad it can get.

The Canucks are currently averaging 3.65 goals against per game, which would be the worst mark for the franchise since the 1990-91 season, back when goaltending equipment consisted of a hope and a prayer.

But the Canucks are just a fraction away from the 2022-23 Canucks, who averaged 3.61 goals against per game. Can the Canucks stay worse than that awful season, or will they improve down the stretch and avoid that ignominious honour?

How about points percentage? The Canucks currently have the worst points percentage of any Canucks team in the salary cap era at .368, with their 18-33-6 record, far worse than the 2016-17 Canucks at .421.

They’ll be hard-pressed to match the worst season in franchise history, the 1971-72 Canucks, who went 20-50-8 for a .308 points percentage, but how low can they go?

Then there’s the penalty kill, which is nearing a franchise low. The worst penalty kill percentage by a Canucks team, at least since they started recording the statistic in 1977, belongs to the 1984-85 Canucks, who finished the season at 70.5%, which also happens to be the fifth-worst penalty kill in NHL history.

The 2025-26 Canucks are currently at 70.6%. Will they fall below the 1984-85 Canucks to set a new franchise record? If so, will they sink low enough to pass the 1979-80 Los Angeles Kings, who have the worst penalty kill of all time at 68.2%?

You’ll have to watch and find out.

Part of being a Canucks fan is talking about how the bad times the team is currently facing are nothing compared to the bad times they previously faced.

If you don’t stick with the team through thick and thin, you’ll be in trouble in future conversations with other Canucks fans, who will regale you with stories about the Messier/Keenan years, or watching the Bill LaForge-coached Canucks, or endless beatdowns in the seventies at the hands of teams from the east.

Someday in the future, when a young Canucks fan is complaining about head coach Brad Marchand and how he’s ruining the development of the team’s prospects, you’ll be able to say, “Ha, this is nothing; I was here for the Adam Foote years.”

It’s entirely possible that you — yes, you — are the Canucks’ bad luck charm. The only reason they’ve been playing so poorly this season is because you have been watching them.

That means you must continue watching them to make sure they finish as low in the standings as possible to ensure they get the best possible odds at the first overall pick in the 2026 NHL Entry Draft.

At this point, it’s your duty as a Canucks fan to watch every game and make sure they keep losing. The moment you stop watching is when they’ll go on a winning streak and ruin everything.

It’s all up to you.