The Vancouver Canucks might not score as many goals these days as they have in years past. But they do have goals these days, and that’s probably more important in the long run.

One of the Canucks’ stated goals has been to get both tougher to play against and just plain tougher in general. This goes all the way back to the latter half of the 2025-26 season, when a late spate of fighting majors – and the arrival of Curtis Douglas – played a major role in a clear culture shift and the installation of some long-awaited good vibes around the team. Remaining players and incoming management alike have commented on the need for the Canucks to add more of what Brian Burke called “truculence” to the roster. And, this offseason, they set out to do so.

One of the words that was thrown around most with regard to the Canucks’ veteran additions this offseason was “mentorship,” and that’s obviously important to a young and rebuilding team. But the Canucks specifically seemed to seek out mentor-types that also had a real element of physicality to their games.

With that in mind, we thought we’d take a good look at just how talented this incoming quartet of veterans are when the gloves come off. Huge shoutout to hockeyfights.com for being an incredible resource!

We’re going to write in ascending order of toughness here, and you had to know that would mean Brendan Gallagher came first. At 5’9”, Gallagher can’t really be expected to be much of a threat via fisticuffs, and, indeed, he is not. But then, winning fights isn’t really the point of a player like Gallagher. It’s more about starting them.

Gallagher has fought 14 times in his NHL career, an average of exactly one bout per year over his 14-year run. When Gallagher does fight, his opponent is all-but-guaranteed to be bigger than him. There’s also a good chance that the opponent is both a better player than Gallagher and that they take an extra penalty in the exchange. Gallagher is an agitator, and he has primarily used fighting to draw the opposition off their game and into the penalty box.

Gallagher has fought individuals as large as Brady Tkachuk and as skilled as Zach Werenski.

Did he win either of those scraps? No. Does that really matter? Also no. For someone like Gallagher, just getting those guys off the ice is a win, as is getting them to such a point of frustration in the first place.

Gallagher only fought once this most recent season, but it was one of the more impressive showings of his career. After trucking a Maple Leaf in mid-ice, Gallagher drew a roughing minor out of Jake McCabe and then put McCabe down with a couple stiff shots. McCabe, for what it’s worth, stands at 6’1” and 210 pounds. This won’t be the norm from Gallagher, but it’s a nice highlight on his card.

Next up, we’ve got Paul Cotter, who at 6’3” and 213 pounds is a lot bigger than Gallagher, but who hasn’t fought quite as frequently. In five NHL seasons, Cotter has fought thrice. To say he’s had a diverse range of opponents across those three fights might be putting it mildly.

Cotter’s first NHL fight came against our old pal Troy Stecher while Cotter was still a rookie, and he took a pretty good whomping from a much smaller player. He did much better the next year in getting Rangers star Vincent Trocheck to drop the mitts, and then laying some solid licks into him.

Cotter only fought once last year, and it was mostly a wrestling match, but it did come against Brendan Smith, a veteran scrapper often considered to be a ‘light-heavy’ in fighting terms. This at least shows a willingness to step up a weight class when the situation calls for it, even if Cotter wisely played it rather safe in the bout. For the most part, Cotter’s physicality comes from his hitting, as evidenced by the 192 he threw last season.

We’re into much more familiar territory with Luke Schenn. In his 18-year NHL career to date, Schenn has fought a whopping 86 times, including five fights in each of his last three seasons. Schenn is the most frequent fighter the Canucks brought in this offseason, and he’s also fairly good at it, despite a willingness to match up with quite literally anyone in the league.

We don’t have time to go over an 86-fight card here, but it’s well worth mentioning that Schenn has fought names as significant as Ross Johnston, Mathieu Olivier, Tom Wilson, Tanner Jeannot, and, on a ridiculous number of occasions, the Foligno brothers. That means he’s already fought all the toughest individuals still in this league.

Go back further into Schenn’s card, back to an era when the NHL had true heavyweight enforcers, and you’ll find even scarier names like Chris Neil.

Record-wise, Schenn comes out relatively even, winning as many as he’s losing and often skating away with something at least resembling a draw, even against the toughest of the tough. And, as we mentioned above, he hasn’t exactly slowed down despite reaching his mid-30s. Last season, he fought former teammate Dakota Joshua, Johnston, Mark Kastelic, Jacob Middleton, and Jeff Malott. And according to our friends at HockeyFights.com, Schenn held a record of 4-1-0, with his only loss coming against Johnston.

Not only can Schenn still get it done with the gloves off, he might be better than ever at it.

Which is why it might be surprising that we’re not ending the list with Schenn, but instead with Jamie Oleksiak. Over the course of his own 14-year NHL career, Oleksiak has fought 38 times, for an average of slightly fewer than three per season. And unlike Schenn, Oleksiak has slowed down in this regard, going from a high of seven fights in 2017-18 to just two last year and zero the season before (although he had as many as five as recently as 2022-23).

Standing at 6’7” and 252 pounds, Oleksiak has a size advantage against most opponents, and as a result, his fight card is filled almost exclusively with heavyweights. And while he may not do it as much as Schenn, Oleksiak typically fights to better results.

This time, we’ve got direct head-to-head evidence. Oleksiak and Schenn have fought one another twice, once in 2021 and again in 2023 when Schenn was a Canuck. Both were fairly clear-cut wins for Oleksiak.

Now, there is probably no tougher individual in the sport of hockey than Nicolas Deslauriers, currently of the Carolina Hurricanes. He and Oleksiak have had a rivalry of sorts over the years, dropping the gloves four times between 2015 and the present day. Oleksiak won the first matchup, but then Deslauriers aged into his fists and turned the tide for the next three. Still, the fact that Oleksiak is willing to go up against the best of the best so repeatedly is testament to his fortitude.

Over the years, we can find Oleksiak scoring clear Ws over pugilistic types like Liam O’Brien, Nikita Zadorov, Keegan Kolesar, and more, including the aforementioned Schenn. Perhaps the most impressive victory on Oleksiak’s card came against Olivier in 2021. If Deslauriers isn’t the reigning heavyweight champ of the NHL, then it’s Olivier, but Oleksiak handled him fairly easily back then. Sure, it’s only one matchup and sure it was a few years ago, but it’s also Mathieu Olivier.

And although Oleksiak has slowed down the frequency, he hasn’t slowed down the fists themselves. His two fights last year were both absolute barn-burners, including a win over Logan Stanley, one of the few players around with as much reach as Oleksiak, and one of the bouts of the year against Marcus Foligno, which Oleksiak lost narrowly.

Put all that together, and we’d say in terms of ‘bulk toughness,’ or the ability to not just fight, but win against the baddest this league has to offer, Oleksiak is probably the top pugilist the Canucks have had in a good long while.

Seriously, who was the last guy the Canucks had on hand who could legitimately go toe-to-toe with the true heavyweight champs of the league? Was it Wade Brookbank?!

Fighting is a component of hockey with diminishing importance in the modern game over the long run. But recent trends have turned the NHL back toward it a bit all the same, as evidenced most clearly by the success of the rough-and-rowdy Florida Panthers. Many in the fanbase and mediasphere alike have opined that if the Canucks are set to lose most of their games over the next couple of seasons – and they are – then it would be nice if they at least didn’t get beat up so much along the way.

In terms of getting tougher to play against in general, tougher with the gloves off specifically, and just plain tougher, GM Ryan Johnson seems to have done a fine job in his first few transactions at the helm.

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