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How should the Canucks split up Thatcher Demko and Kevin Lankinen’s starts?
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Photo credit: Bob Frid-Imagn Images
David Quadrelli
Sep 3, 2025, 09:00 EDTUpdated: Sep 3, 2025, 15:38 EDT
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It’s been a topic of conversation for the past few Vancouver Canucks seasons, and for good reason.
How should the Canucks manage Thatcher Demko’s workload?
Unlike in past seasons, however, the Canucks have two goaltenders who would be bona fide number one starters on some other teams around the league.
Naturally, that makes this season’s edition of “How should the Canucks manage Thatcher Demko’s workload” far more interesting.

Demko’s health

By now, you know all about Demko’s recent injury history. In case you forgot, here’s a brief reminder courtesy of InGoal Magazine‘s Kevin Woodley on a recent episode of Canucks Conversation.
“You look at his first year as a starter — 64 games. Gets injured late in the season, plays through it for a while until they’re clearly no longer in the playoffs, then they shut him down. 64 games is his career high. He needed surgery that offseason. He comes off the knee surgery in the offseason, there’s nobody from staff on hand for his first skates, so he goes like a bat out of hell trying to get ready for the start of the season with nobody monitoring it or limiting reps. He comes back, and he already has a compensatory hitch to his movement by the time the season starts that nobody spots. He was narrowing his butterfly as he drops to protect the knee, which led to the groin injury. That season was cut short because he wasn’t healthy in the summer.
“He gets through a heavy workload, ends up hurt at the end, comes back the next year and gets hurt in part because he never fully recovered from that. So he gets hurt again, has a year where he’s off and on, then went into the next season healthy because he used the break with the groin injury to change his training, and has a great offseason like he is reportedly having this offseason.
“So if you step back and look at it, when he has a healthy summer, he has a good season where he plays a lot of games. When he finishes the year not healthy and has to rehab in the summer not doing his regular work, that’s where he runs into trouble during the season. So in terms of that pattern, it all sets up to be a good season this year.”
What does all this mean? Nearly everyone can agree by now that the Canucks need to limit Demko’s workload, at least to some extent. While the club clearly believes in his new preventative training methods — so much so that they signed him to a three-year extension this offseason — the fact remains that Demko’s inability to stay healthy has hurt the club in recent years.
For the Canucks to be great, they need a healthy — and also great — Demko behind them. Now, it’s not quite as simple as saying “great, give him half the starts and Kevin Lankinen the other half” (although it might be). Demko seems to be a goaltender who plays best when he can get into a groove, and when he struggled to get into a groove last season (thanks to multiple injuries, we should mention), the results weren’t there.
The risk with limiting Demko’s starts too much is that he struggles to find the level to his game that we’ve seen him reach before. When he finished as the runner-up to the Vezina Trophy in 2023-24, he appeared in 51 games. But of course, he suffered a knee injury that kept him out of the playoffs, and that’s when the Canucks could have really used some Vezina-calibre goaltending.
Make no mistake about it: there is a sweet spot. Sure, it’s likely not 41 games for Demko and 41 for Lankinen. But with the condensed nature of the 2025-26 schedule thanks to the Olympic break, it might end up being closer to that than you might think.

The Lankinen factor

Now obviously, this isn’t a story only about Thatcher Demko. The Canucks are also paying a good chunk of money to Kevin Lankinen next season, after he proved himself to be a capable goaltender on his one-year “show-me” deal, with the Canucks signing him to a five-year extension.
Lankinen was at times stellar for the Canucks last season, particularly at the start of the season when he was routinely stealing them games. Lankinen’s level of play — both by the eye test and the numbers — began to dwindle later in the season, with March being his worst month in terms of save percentage with a measly .868 to his name. Lankinen started 49 games for the Canucks last season, and his play through 34 starts — before March — was more than good enough.
That would suggest that by limiting Demko’s starts in an effort to keep him healthy, the Canucks will also get the best version of Kevin Lankinen. So how many starts does that equate to? At the very least, Lankinen should get every one of the back-to-backs on the Canucks’ schedule, which would mean he gets at least 13. From there, there are all sorts of opportunities for the Canucks to rotate between the two goaltenders, as the business of this year’s schedule almost demands that teams have two good goaltenders.
And with a healthy Demko and a non-overworked Kevin Lankinen, the Canucks might find themselves with some of the best goaltending in the league when all is said and done.

The Perfect split

If we apply the absolute airtight logic that Lankinen is great until he reaches 35 starts and that Demko doesn’t get hurt until he reaches 50 games (sarcasm), then it would seem the perfect workload split for the Canucks’ crease sees Demko log 40-45 games and Lankinen pick up the other 37-42.
Could it be more like 49 for Demko and 33 for Lankinen? Of course. But what it shouldn’t be is 55 or more for Demko and 27 or fewer for Lankinen. The Canucks have two great goaltenders, and using them both consistently should bring out the absolute best from both of them.
What do you think the perfect split for Demko and Lankinen is in 2025-26? Let us know in the comments section below!
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