We’re less than a month from the puck being dropped on the 2026-27 NHL regular season. And as soon as that happens, we’ve got a feeling that the Vancouver Canucks are going to start dropping something else with a lot greater frequency…the gloves!

One bold prediction we’ve got for the 2026-27 campaign is that the Canucks are going to quite literally double the amount of fighting majors they earned in 2025-26.

The number they hit last year was 15, so we’re calling for 30 fights. And we’ve got to start by saying that 15 is a pretty low base to be starting from. It’s the lowest amount the team has had since the pandemic-shortened 56-game schedule of 2020-21. It wasn’t the lowest amount in the entire league – that was Colorado and their 10 majors – but it was close, and seemed an especially low number for a team that spent the entire season in the basement of the standings.

But the Canucks’ total here is also a little misleading, especially if we’re attempting to judge this current version of the team. And that’s because, of those 15 fighting majors, eight of them came on or after March 26, 2026.

That’s right, that means that more than half of the Canucks’ total fights last year came in the final three weeks of the season. More than half of their fights, and more than half of their individual fighters, too. Only four Canucks – Victor Mancini, Evander Kane, Conor Garland, and Marcus Pettersson – fought before late March. Six different Canucks did so after March 26.

So, clearly the Canucks ended their season on a bit of a hot-tempered streak. What happened in March? Two key things. The first was the plucking of enforcer Curtis Douglas on waivers from the Tampa Bay Lightning. The arrival of the 6’9” behemoth seemed to have everyone on the Vancouver roster standing a little taller right from the jump.

But Douglas is gone to Seattle now, and Kane, Garland, and Pettersson are gone too. That’s why the second thing that happened in March is going to be more important heading into next year, and that’s the youth movement of the Canucks starting to get involved in the fisticuffs, with Zeev Buium leading the way.

The team got some fun mid-March social media content when Buium got involved in some post-practice fight club with Tom Willander and Elias Pettersson. But it wasn’t all for fun. A few nights later, Buium stepped into an end-of-game scrum to defend Willander, and wound up dropping the gloves for his first NHL fight against fellow young blueliner Brandt Clarke of the Los Angeles Kings.

Buium really seemed to spark something in his teammates with that action. Douglas fought the very next game, and all of Teddy Blueger, Filip Hronek, Elias Pettersson, and Drew O’Connor would do the same over the next couple of weeks.

Not only did the Canucks fight more at the end of the season, but they talked about fighting a lot. Specifically, they said sticking together and standing up for one another brought the team together, and that it had a lot to do with the positive vibes in the dressing room as they closed out the year.

And Buium remained the face of it. In speaking to the press, he said, “You can tell it’s changed. I think just by the way we play, we’ve really come together off the ice and got to know each other and care about each other…All of us are really starting to come together and starting to move forward and not track back. And hopefully we can just carry that in the next game and next year.”

Fighting for one another was one of the few things the Canucks managed to do right by the end of 2025-26. And it seems like something they’ll want to carry into 2026-27.

The Canucks have picked up some muscle over the course of this offseason to make up for some of what they’ve lost.

That obviously starts with Luke Schenn, who has fought exactly five times each in each of the past three seasons. And it includes Jamie Oleksiak, who only fought twice last year, but remains especially effective with the mitts discarded. Other arrivals Paul Cotter and Brendan Gallagher have been known to throw down, too.

But while Schenn is the odds-on favourite to lead the Canucks in fighting majors, we don’t necessarily think he’ll be leading the pugilistic charge, or at least not on his own. We still expect the push to come primarily from the youth, as players like Buium quite literally fight for the team, for pride, and to establish an identity for this roster that can be carried forward into more competitive years.

So who do we expect to do all this fighting this upcoming year? Just as was the case in late March, we expect it to be almost everyone. It’s really got to be a group effort. Enforcing by committee.

As we make our prediction, we do realize a climb from 15 majors to 30 is a big one. But it’s not that big. Two different teams went over 30 fights last season: the Tampa Bay Lightning (44) and the Boston Bruins (33).

They’re lofty totals, but we think that if the Canucks start the season – or even the preseason – with the same “us against the world” attitude that they closed off last season with, they’ll start to pile up the majors fairly quickly.

The old saying goes that “if you can’t beat ‘em, beat ‘em up.” We’d like to suggest a slightly modified motto for the 2026-27 Canucks, and it’s “if you can’t fight for the playoffs, fight for each other.”

An attitude like that will not just prove entertaining for fans in what could otherwise be another tough season; the camaraderie it builds should pay off down the road, when the real fight for the playoffs begins.