Last season, the Vancouver Canucks struggled to generate offence, particularly off the rush. According to Money Puck, the team ranked 22nd in expected goals percentage in five-on-five play and 22nd in goal differential with a minus-10 at even strength.
The biggest talking point throughout the year was former Head Coach Rick Tocchet’s systems and how they didn’t utilize the roster’s strengths to generate offence.
Coming into the 2025-26 season, the team has a new Head Coach in Adam Foote. The club also brought in some new personnel in Evander Kane with the hope of adding more offence to the team’s top-six forward group.
Although Foote is seen as a more defensive-minded coach, like Tocchet, we can expect changes to the team’s style of play to improve their performance in the offensive zone.
The first thing we can examine when it comes to creating more offence this season is the defensive group the team is starting with.
Quinn Hughes led the way last season, registering a team-high 76 points. He managed to do so despite Hughes playing through a nagging injury for a large portion of the season. A healthy Hughes, paired with the rest of the defensive corps that has been vastly upgraded from what it was on opening night last year, is the first key to success offensively.
At the beginning of the 2024-25 season, there was a glaring lack of puck movers on the backend. Coming into this season, there is no shortage of capable puck movers. Filip Hronek, Elias Pettersson, Marcus Pettersson and Tyler Myers all have the ability to jump up into the rush and support the forward group to open things up in the offensive zone.
While we’ve seen this defensive group play together last season, we haven’t seen them at full force for a large portion of an NHL regular season, especially when you consider Hughes was playing through his aforementioned injury.
The Canucks did well at opening things up with their puck movement on the backend last season. The defencemen did a better job of keeping their feet moving at the point while maintaining puck possession, which kept the opposition on their toes and opened up more for the forwards down low.
There were many times when Hughes and Hronek ended up with the puck below the circles, while forwards jumped back to the point to support the defencemen, as they moved the puck around the offensive zone. This is what creates confusion defensively for the opposing team and allows the Canucks to find holes in the defence to generate offensive chances.
With the upgrades to the defensive core, it’s not just up to Hughes and Hronek to do this, as the team can rely on its bottom four pairings to be capable of jumping into the play and play a similar style in the offensive zone.
Shifting to creating more offence off the rush, the Canucks forward group has a solid combination of players capable of generating chances up the ice. The biggest key to this is speed. Players like Filip Chytil, Conor Garland, and Nils Höglander have had considerable success creating off the rush, utilizing their combination of speed and skill to enter the offensive zone with possession of the puck.
Last season, we saw the team play a lot of dump-and-chase hockey. Often, the Canucks would dump the puck into the zone to try and create through the forecheck and cycle down low. There will always be a time and place for this style of hockey, but to be a dangerous team offensively in the NHL, you need to be able to create chances off the rush as well.
Though there haven’t been many changes to the Canucks forward group, we can attribute their lack of play off the rush to Tocchet’s preferred style of dump-and-chase hockey. Players like Elias Pettersson, who are highly skilled, need to be given the green light to play creatively to be successful.
Allowing Pettersson, Chytil and the rest of the forward group to play with creativity off the rush, along with the team’s defencemen jumping up into the play, is the best way for the Canucks to generate more scoring chances and open things up while entering the zone. Creating odd-man rushes, either four-on-threes or three-on-twos, while entering the offensive zone means there is an uncovered skater for the puck carrier to find for a scoring chance.
The Canucks’ roster may not have seen as many upgrades as fans had hoped for so far through the offseason. That being said, we haven’t seen much of the team from last year at full force and with a new coaching staff, there are many new opportunities for the team to learn from last season and create new systems to generate more offence both in zone and off the rush.
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