With a win over Anaheim and a loss to Vegas, it was a mixed-bag weekend for the Vancouver Canucks. And now it’s a mailbag Monday here at CanucksArmy. The march to the finish line is truly upon us with just five games remaining on the schedule. That has many of you posing questions about the off-season and beyond. There is no doubt that this front office has plenty of heavy lifting ahead of it to get the Canucks turned in the right direction. The mailbag, too, requires some heavy lifting this week with all of the responses we got from CA readers. There’s no playing out the string here, so let’s get down to business: 
Second part first, the answer is no. As for who will hold down the second line centre spot when training camp rolls around, the crystal ball is in the shop for repairs so the answer is not readily apparent at the moment. I’m sure the name Josh Norris will surface once again in the summer months. Let’s see if a team (or teams) flame out in the first round of the playoffs and feel the need to alter the composition of its roster.
Maybe a few new trade partners will present themselves. Will the Canucks take a flyer on an offer sheet candidate? Patrik Allvin has sounded confident that he can make an offensive centre materialize for this organization, but it’s one thing to say it and another to make that happen. It just doesn’t feel like a true 2C option is currently in the fold, so with the eyes of the hockey world on the Canucks this summer, they are going to have to pull the proverbial rabbit out of their hat.
There are a bunch of them: Wilt Chamberlain scoring 100 points in an NBA game. Jack Nicklaus winning 18 golf majors. Nolan Ryan’s 5714 career strike outs. And I sincerely hope no one ever bests Joey Chestnut’s 83 hot dogs eaten in 10 minutes. I get indigestion just thinking about that one.
The easy answer is they are somewhere in the middle. We all know everything fell their way in a 50-win and 109 point season and that so many career bests were always going to be tough to replicate. But it’s also easy to look at the injuries and adversity this season and think this team flushed so many points it should have collected. This is a flawed roster – especially after dealing JT Miller – so it’s hard to see this group as currently constructed a 100-point team.
Yet with a healthy Thatcher Demko at the top of his game, Quinn Hughes making up the 14 games he missed due to injury and Elias Pettersson returning to something close to star level and you can see the foundation of a team that should be much better than it is. Still, it’s been apparent on so many nights this season that the club needs an injection of reliable offensive producers at the top of the lineup. 
With just five games to go, the Canucks aren’t going to move far from their current slot in the overall standings. A run either way would move them a few spots, but they’re not going to see a seismic shift. I’m inclined to keep rolling with all the Abbotsford call-ups and see what they can do with the opportunities. I’d like to see EP40 return for a couple of games rather than have his disappointing season end with an injury.
The better team won on Sunday, but I thought the undermanned Canucks put up a decent fight against a Vegas outfit with legitimate designs on another Stanley Cup. Maybe that’s the best of both worlds. Play hard and compete, but ultimately come up a goal short. Plus the schedule has the Canucks facing Dallas, Colorado, Minnesota and Vegas again which means regardless how well the team plays, it may not be up to the challenge of teams preparing for the playoffs.
This feels like the longest of longshots, but never say never. Right? The 25-year-old finished tied for sixth in KHL scoring this season with 28 goals and 57 points. Among those that produced more than Kravtsov this season: former Canucks Josh Leivo and Sheldon Rempal. Kravtsov was so underwhelming in his 16 games with the Canucks late in the 2022-23 season after being acquired from the Rangers. It’s hard to imagine Rick Tocchet looking at his lineup and thinking what he really needs next season – if he’s back – is a Vitali Kravtsov. You asked what the chances are? I’m going to see less than 10%.
As time winds down on this season, it’s so frustrating recalling last spring when the Canucks played 13 playoff games and the season extended to the May long weekend. And here we are now heading for an eighth time in the last 10 seasons without post-season hockey in Vancouver. And, of course, one of the two times the team played playoff hockey it was invited to an expanded tournament played in front of no fans in Edmonton. As teams around the league punch their tickets to the playoffs, I keep seeing things like ‘for the seventh time in eight seasons’ and think what that kind of consistency must look and feel like for those fan bases. I’m also reminded that it is possible.
You can’t make multiple consecutive appearances without the first one. So that’s probably the place to start and build from there. The Canucks will go as far as their stars take them. But without knowing the full roster for next season it’s impossible to make projections at this early stage. The fans here deserve playoff hockey on the regular. But as we’ve all learned from the past decade, wanting it doesn’t necessarily make it so. It’s wild to think you have to go back to the springs of 2012 and 2013 to find the last example of the Canucks qualifying for the post-season in consecutive years. That is too damn long.

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