With their 4-2 loss to Troy Stecher and the Toronto Maple Leafs on Halloween night, the Vancouver Canucks completed their first month of the 2026-27 season.

Actually, technically speaking, this has been slightly longer than a month, as the season actually started on September 29 this year. But that’s close enough for the purposes of a head-to-head comparison between the Canucks’ first months of last year’s 2025-26 season and this current 2026-27 campaign.

The first thing to note is that this year’s Canucks have played four more games in their first month than did the 2025-26 Canucks, which tells us that we should pay more attention to the percentages and per-game rates here than any of the totals.

But any way you slice it, the 2026-27 Canucks are a worse-performing team than were the 2025-26 Canucks, and perhaps especially so through the first month of the season.

It might be hard for most to remember that the 2025-26 Canucks finished the month of October with a dead-even .500 record, and just on the outside of a playoff spot looking in. Obviously, that wouldn’t last. And it has to be said that this was a Canucks roster that included, among other since-departed names, Quinn Hughes, Kiefer Sherwood, Conor Garland, Marcus Pettersson, and Tyler Myers. Many of those names got off to relatively hot starts in 2025-26, and helped carry the Canucks a little higher in the standings than they probably should have been. That’s not to mention a temporarily healthy Thatcher Demko tending the nets.

There’s been none of that in 2026-27, and while some of the remaining veterans have definitely stepped it up in their own way, it hasn’t been enough to drag the Canucks out of the basement they finished last year in.

The general trend of the 2026-27 team being much worse than the 2025-26 team through the early going continues here. This year’s Canucks don’t score quite as much, and they let goals in at exactly a 50% higher rate than did last year’s crew.

That said, there are a few reasons for light optimism here. The Canucks’ goal-scoring isn’t down that much from October to October, and that’s saying something, because the 2025-26 team had a point-per-game Hughes and Sherwood shooting the lights out. This year’s team had to be expected to take a step back on offence, and it’s encouraging that it hasn’t been an enormous step.

And with the goals against, how much of that is down to the difference between Demko being the veteran starter in 2025-26 and it being an especially porous Kevin Lankinen for 2026-27? The Canucks’ GA has trended downward ever since they handed the starter’s reins over to Leevi Meriläinen, and should continue to do so.

Make no mistake, the Canucks are on pace for an absolutely catastrophic goal differential that will probably eclipse the -100 they achieved last year. But the October-to-October dropoff, specifically, has not been as bad as some might have projected, and context helps lessen the blow even further. 

Good news! The Canucks’ power play numbers are up!

Bad news! The Canucks’ penalty kill numbers are down!

Neutral news! It might not have much to do with the Canucks themselves.

The overall NHL power play success percentage is currently the highest it’s been in over a decade, and the overall NHL penalty kill success percentage is currently the lowest it’s been in over a decade. So, really, the Canucks are just following the league-wide trend here.

That said, context adds more to this discussion. The fact that the Canucks have a higher PP percentage through October with a roster that does not include Hughes is an accomplishment in and of itself. As is the fact that this entirely refurbished and reorganized PK corps has only fallen off so far and has shown plenty of signs of rebounding of late.

We feel we’re getting a bit repetitive at this point, but maybe it all bears repeating. The Canucks’ analytic stats were expected to take a hit this year, both overall and especially in the early going. That these Canucks, minus folks like Hughes and Sherwood and Demko and so on, have only seen each of their numbers drop a few percentage points is probably, on the whole, less of a decline than was expected.

Again, there’s only so much shine that can be put on a set of numbers that are, objectively speaking, bad. These are some of the worst analytics in the league, and that remains a problem. But Manny Malhotra and the coaching staff deserve some credit here for stemming the bleeding before it became outright fatal. 

At first, it might be surprising to learn that the current Canucks are only barely outhitting last year’s Canucks, given that this year’s Canucks put such an emphasis on team toughness. But then you remember that the one-man wrecking crew Sherwood was still on the team last year, and it actually becomes impressive that these new Canucks have not just kept pace, but slightly outdone it.

Everything else has remained more-or-less steady. One expected a younger team to give away more pucks, but it hasn’t been an egregious amount more. That the takeaways have slightly increased is encouraging.

Perhaps most notable here is the faceoff percentage. That these Canucks, who only dressed Aatu Räty for four games, actually have a higher winning percentage than last year’s squad is an accomplishment. And credit for that upward trend probably goes directly to Malhotra.