The Vancouver Canucks were both the last-place team and the lowest-scoring team in the NHL for the 2025-26 season, and by rather large margins. So, of course, they opened up the 2026-27 season by scoring six goals and beating the Edmonton Oilers.

Even those who entered this year with hopes of the Canucks losing every game and guaranteeing another last-place finish probably had to smile a little bit at the win. But with the Canucks starting the season off 1-0-0 – and how! – a question is raised about how much the Canucks can truly afford to win over the next 83 games.

And, to be clear, the real answer is ‘as much as they are able.’ There’s no one singular path to a successful rebuild, and last-place finishes aren’t an absolute necessity. But most would agree that more high draft picks, and the prospects that tend to come with those high draft picks, are the Canucks’ best way of achieving long-term success. And high draft picks typically only come from a team finishing in the basement of the league standings.

The plan, though we’ll never hear management, coaching staff, or players call it by name, is for the Canucks to finish in the bottom three, at least, again. The question, then, is how often the Canucks can win and still meet that goal.

And the answer is ‘more often than you probably thought.’

The 2025-26 season was the Canucks’ third-worst by winning percentage in franchise history. The Canucks only scraped out 58 points, last in the league by a 14-point margin. And even then, in their darkest season since 1999, the Canucks went 25-49-8.

Is that a good record? No. Is it an abysmal record? It sure is. But it’s also a record that included 25 wins. That’s a lot more than it feels like the Canucks won last year. It’s far more than a quarter of their total games. It’s just a little bit off from being a win every three games.

And that feels pretty manageable, looking ahead at the rest of the 2026-27 season. As in, if the Canucks could pull off a win as they did on opening night every three games, that’d be plenty of entertainment and positive vibes for the whole year, and enough to get fans through all the losses that might come in between.

Put another way, the high from beating the Oilers 6-5 should last long enough to cover two losses in the next two games, at which point the Canucks would, on average, be scheduled to win another one.

One step forward, two steps back, all season long. That doesn’t sound too burdensome, does it?

And that’s only the case if the Canucks wanted to replicate their results from last season, which they probably don’t. They don’t need to finish in last place by two touchdowns this year. They’ve got plenty of wiggle room, and that wiggle room could take the form of more wins.

The Chicago Blackhawks finished in second-to-last place in 2025-26 with 72 points, 14 more than the Canucks. Their record was 29-39-14. For them, that was a win every 2.8 games. And that’s saying nothing about their 14 other games in which they went to overtime and lost, which is still plenty of excitement.

If we move one place up the standings from there, we get into what have to be called at least decent win totals. The Calgary Flames and New York Rangers each finished with 78 points and identical records of 34-39-9.

Those records are just five games back from .500 hockey. They feature 34 wins, which is a win every 2.4 games. It’s a win in 41.5% of their games.

And they still finished in the bottom-four of the league. The Rangers got the fifth overall pick and Alberts Smits out of the season. The Flames got the sixth overall pick and Carson Carels.

It’s also been noted that, in this era of constant salary cap inflation, most teams have spent the offseason at least attempting to get better. There aren’t that many teams designed to outright tank, aside from the Canucks and the Flames.

That should mean the Canucks don’t even have to approach a record like they did last year to finish with high odds in the lottery. They’ve built up a buffer between them and the rest of the league’s worst. A record like the Blackhawks’, Flames’, or Rangers’ last year should more than suffice to keep them at least in the bottom three of the standings, and that’s all they need to guarantee a top-five draft selection.

If we had to put a nice round number to it, we’d estimate the Canucks can ‘afford’ to win at least 30 games in the 2026-27 season while still winding up in the bottom three of the standings and the top five of the draft.

And a 30-win season doesn’t sound nearly as dreadful as some are making it out to be.

It’s the Canucks winning approximately 36% of their games. It’s a win every 2.8 games, or slightly better than a win every three. It’s a slightly better pace than one step forward, two steps back.

Why does that matter? Because it means that wins as the Canucks got on opening night can be celebrated wholeheartedly. Make no mistake, the Canucks are going to lose, and lose plenty, in 2026-27. And, sure, that’s part of the goal. But most who tuned in to Tuesday night’s game will agree that they didn’t find themselves cheering for a loss. Most will agree that they stood up and cheered when Paul Cotter scored that overtime winner in his Vancouver debut.

Those moments matter, even in a losing season. They matter a great deal to a team that has embraced a rebuild and is counting moral victories now, hoping they’ll pay off several years down the road. And they matter because most fans ultimately watch sports to see their teams win.

With this knowledge, Canucks fans can cheer and celebrate with no apprehensions whenever the Canucks do get a win at any point in the 2026-27 season. They can appreciate the gains in things like buy-in to Manny Malhotra’s system, without worrying too much about losses in draft standing.

They’ve still got a lot of ground to make up before they start winning enough to pull themselves out of the basement. Until then, wins are just gravy on top of a patiently-baking pie. They can be enjoyed, not regretted, even if around 29 more of them occur over the next seven months or so.

Especially when they come against the Oilers.