What a difference a week can make.

The 2026 NHL Entry Draft and the 2026 Free Agent Frenzy happened within days of one another, and represented the first opportunities for GM Ryan Johnson and co-POHOs Henrik and Daniel Sedin to make their mark on the team.

So far, most would say, so good.

Johnson and Co. probably aren’t done making changes quite yet. But there’s enough change already done, and enough of the important pieces in place already, to start making guesses about the short-term shape of the roster. Today, we’re going to attempt a post-July 1 depth chart update to see how the 2026-27 edition of the Canucks are looking so far.

For now, it’s probably easiest to start in the crease.

The area with the least mystery on the roster is goaltending. That does not, however, mean that it is absent of question marks.

Thatcher Demko is apparently recovering from corrective surgery, is back on the ice, and is intent on returning to play. He’s the de facto starter until proven otherwise.

Kevin Lankinen seems ensconced in place as either the veteran backup or the backup starter in the event of another Demko injury.

That leaves the 26-year-old Nikita Tolopilo in an interesting place. He’s all out of waiver exemption, so freely sending him to Abbotsford is no longer a risk-free option. In an ideal situation, the Canucks would start with Demko and Lankinen, but keep Tolopilo around in the likely event that Demko needs some IR time or load management. But if they want to do that, that’s probably going to require them to carry all three goalies on their roster.

Will they have room for that? We’ll continue to explore the notion, but for now the depth chart looks like:

The blueline is also fairly easy to sort out, with the only real question at this point being whether the Canucks intend to carry seven or eight defenders, and who those extras might be.

The top three seem set in stone. Filip Hronek is the present, and Zeev Buium is the future. Together, they probably form the Canucks’ top pairing for much of the 2026-27 season.

Tom Willander features a rung below Hronek on the RD depth chart, with the potential to eventually climb. He’s probably joined in the top-four by new signing Jamie Oleksiak, though the younger Elias Pettersson might push Oleksiak for those minutes.

Rounding out the set of six likely starters is Luke Schenn, back for his third tour of duty on the right side of the Canucks’ blueline.

Victor Mancini and Kirill Kudryavtsev hold the early inside track on the seventh and eighth D jobs. That could change as of training camp, but the team would probably like to see both make it in an ideal world.

Again, the Canucks will be counting roster spots to ensure they stay under the 23-player maximum, but for now the depth chart looks like:

The forward arrangement is a little tougher to sort out than the back-end, but most of the pieces are in clear enough spots for now.

Down the middle, it’ll be a bit of a fight between the senior Elias Pettersson and Marco Rossi for the 1C designation, but both will occupy the top-six to some extent. Behind them is Aatu Räty, who some are hoping for a breakout from, and perhaps Filip Chytil, too – though many suspect his playing future may be on the wing.

Other centres in the running for an opening night spot are the 19-year-old Braeden Cootes, who won a gig in last year’s training camp, and the newly-signed Ilya Safonov. For our money, we like the option of sending Cootes to the AHL and giving Safonov an early try.

The wings will be a mixture of old and new faces. There’s actually a really interesting question to be had about who is the current top winger on the organizational chart. Jake DeBrusk is the default answer, but many suspect he will be traded before opening night. After him, it’s probably Brock Boeser, but the team would love it if Liam Öhgren continued his ascension and grabbed that spot. Those three, if they all stay, will probably occupy three of the four top-six winger slots, with a number of other candidates ready to join them, including Linus Karlsson, Drew O’Connor, Brendan Gallagher, Jonathan Lekkerimäki, and perhaps the aforementioned Chytil.
Other wings who should have a spot somewhere in the mix are Paul Cotter and Max Sasson, with a few others on the periphery like Ty Mueller and Arshdeep Bains.

As it stands, we think a likely arrangement of the forwards is something like:

Since the topic of trading DeBrusk is still prominent, we thought we might as well do a DeBrusk-less version, too:

The Canucks will have to make some choices, so long as preseason injuries don’t make it a moot point. They cannot carry 14 forwards, eight defenders, and three goaltenders into a season. That’s 25 players, and the max is 23.

But those decisions don’t have to be made now. They’ll be after a summer of further transactions, a Training Camp of some position-jockeying, and an entire preseason schedule. This is just where it stands for right here, right now.

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