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Daily Faceoff analyzes the biggest strengths and weaknesses of the Canucks’ prospect pool
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Photo credit: @abbycanucks via X
David Quadrelli
Aug 14, 2025, 17:45 EDT
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On Thursday, Daily Faceoff’s prospect expert Steven Ellis published his analysis on the Vancouver Canucks‘ prospect pool. As regular readers of CanucksArmy know, that’s something we love to do, as we just recently wrapped up our countdown of the top 20 prospects in the Canucks’ system. Additionally, Dave Hall has us covered with Blackfish — the best and most complete Canucks prospect report out there — every week during the season.
But even with that in mind, it’s always fun to get an outside perspective on the Canucks’ prospects, and lucky for us, Steven Ellis does a phenomenal job of giving us that over at Daily Faceoff. One thing that Ellis provides us with is his take on the biggest strength and biggest weakness of every NHL team’s prospect pool.
Here is some of what he had to say about the Canucks’ prospect pool.
Biggest Strength
As a whole, they’ve got some decent defensive depth to work with. Willander is the obvious draw, but Kirill Kudryavtsev has turned out to be quite the find, while Sawyer Mynio is coming off a solid season in the WHL. Victor Mancini has the best odds of starting the season in the NHL, although I doubt he plays a ton of games. Still, you can never have enough defenders in your system, and there’s enough variance in how they all play, too.
Biggest Weakness
The Canucks simply lack depth. They have may six players on this list with a real NHL future, with the others in the top 10 looking more like longshots, but with upside. Outside the top 10, I just don’t love much of what they have to offer. Funny enough, my favorite prospect might be Basile Sansonnens, who has shown he can shut guys down. However, beyond that, the Canucks simply lack the depth that other teams, despite their own lack of playoff success over the past decade, have managed to assemble.
Ellis agreed with us that the Canucks’ top five prospects are: Tom Willander, Jonathan Lekkerimäki, Braeden Cootes, Aleksei Medvedev, and Kirill Kudryavtsev, in that order. But there were some key differences, namely that Arshdeep Bains found himself on our list, while Victor Mancini found himself on Ellis’s list.
You can read the full article from Ellis on the Canucks’ prospect pool by clicking here.

READ NEXT: Blackfish: Where every Canucks prospects will play in 2025-26

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