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JPat’s Monday Mailbag: Should fans believe Canucks ownership will commit to a rebuild this time?
Jeff Paterson's weekly Vancouver Canucks mailbag.
Jeff Paterson
Dec 15, 2025, 13:00 ESTUpdated: Dec 15, 2025, 13:01 EST
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After one of the most frenetic weekends in the history of the Vancouver Canucks, we can all try to catch our breath as the dust settles on what is surely among the most consequential trades in franchise history. Everybody, it seems, has questions about the trade, the fallout, and the new direction of the hockey club. So it’s a good thing we’ve got a Monday mailbag to address many of those concerns. We put out the call and, once again, you came through like Zeev Buium on the Canucks power play. Let’s jump in.
It’s a totally valid question. And I can’t give you any assurance at all that ownership will simply sit back and allow its chosen managers to try again to assemble a roster that one day will contend for the Stanley Cup. But clearly, what the Canucks have done as an organization for a dozen years now hasn’t been working. So hopefully, ownership has its ear to the ground and has an accurate read on the restlessness in the marketplace. Without a doubt, it has to be humbling to be sitting dead last in the NHL standings – even after a win on Sunday. Through the years, the Canucks have had their struggles and had some underachieving teams, but this is different.
This team is 32nd in the overall standings and a mile from a playoff spot 10 days before Christmas. The fact of the matter is, it’s time for the Canucks to take their lumps, play these young players they have acquired, hope they work hard and continue to develop, but ultimately not produce too many wins to spoil what should be the team’s highest draft slot in years. The franchise needs elite-level talent and the best way to acquire it is at the top of the draft. This season is a wash, the captain has been jettisoned, and it’s time for ownership to embrace the pain and not take a single shortcut to do this rebuild properly.
Hey, there is plenty of blame to go around. And those key players have to wear some of the failure, too. There’s no need to relitigate the JT Miller/Elias Pettersson dysfunction, but that certainly played a huge role in the demise and dismantling of the core. No one saw Pettersson falling off the offensive cliff he has. Thatcher Demko just hasn’t been able to stay healthy when the team needed him most. Brock Boeser has been a fine goal scorer, but the 40-goal campaign sure looks like it will be an outlier. Horvat escapes most of the criticism here, simply because he was the first one of the group out the door.
But the team didn’t do enough winning when he was the captain. And same goes for Quinn Hughes. Ultimately, management didn’t do enough to surround the core players aside from the 2023-24 trades to bring in Nikita Zadorov and Elias Lindholm. But even those deals proved questionable since the Canucks parted with significant assets for two players that proved to be rentals. The postseason ‘run’ in the spring of 2024 was fun, but ultimately amounted to just one playoff series victory. And, so here we are, Horvat, Miller and now Hughes no longer play for the Canucks. And the time has come to form a new core and we’ll have to wait and see what roles Pettersson, Boeser and Demko will play as the team tries to rebuild and chart a new course for the future.
There is certainly a similarity in the play styles of all three. Höglander isn’t as tall as the other two, but may be a little more feisty. Öhgren and O’Connor both have decent size and speed, but neither has come anywhere close to a 24-goal season like Höglander has on his resume. Öhgren may have the best wheels of the three, but O’Connor brings penalty killing utility. So they have their differences. All three need to get in on the forecheck and hound defenders to be successful. Is there room on the roster for all three that profile as middle six wingers at best? It’s a fair question. I think Höglander would still attract interest on the trade market, although it’s hard to know what his true value is three games into his return from ankle surgery.
He certainly hasn’t left any kind of mark on the games he has appeared in yet, but it’s best to give him a few more games to get up to speed. Overall, this is where the Canucks need these types of players to all take a step if this team is going to make strides. O’Connor flashed some offensive prowess early in the season, but has gone quiet of late in part to being asked to play centre instead of his natural position on the wing. Liam Öhgren still has first round potential, but the clock is ticking for him to do something, anything at the NHL level. He remains a project, but because of his age, the Canucks have to be patient — to a degree — with his development.
This one made no sense to me on Sunday. Drew O’Connor remained in the middle while Atty Räty was a healthy scratch. A week earlier, Räty had the best game of his young career and people were demanding he get a chance to play higher in the line-up. Instead he came out of it. Adam Foote was asked about it following Sunday’s game in New Jersey, but would only say that Räty might get in next game, but the coach wouldn’t commit to it. Räty was a healthy scratch in San Jose on Black Friday and responded with a nice run of hockey.
Maybe it’s a motivational tactic to keep him hungry. But when one player is a proven centre and has quietly had a solid season in limited minutes and the other looks out of place being asked to play a role he’s not necessarily suited for, it’s hard to understand the logic. I will say this much, though, for Adam Foote. With the trade and the return to the line-up of Nils Höglander, the coach finally has some difficult decisions to make on a nightly basis. And that’s not a bad thing. It means he has options for the first time all season.
I think we need to give management a little bit of time to execute the next steps of its plans. And hopefully those all remain aligned to the rebuild. But there’s not a button a manager can hit that blasts all his veterans into space. It doesn’t work that way. So let’s see how they go about dismantling this roster. Kiefer Sherwood is certainly likely to move on. And we’ll see about others after that. In the meantime, they’re still playing David Kampf 18+ minutes and running with a line-up of guys that are struggling to score. As much as the most ardent tankists want the team to lose every time out, that’s just not reality. And Sunday was a reminder of that. The players in uniform are going to play hard to win. Thatcher Demko is going to give this team saves. They won’t win many games with 10 even-strength shots on goal or getting outshot 21-8 over the final two periods. But they will still manage to get some outcomes to go their way. They have entered into a phase now to figure out exactly what the newcomers add to the mix. And it’s going to remain a struggle on most nights. 
First question: I grew up in North Vancouver a huge fan of the Canucks. I was fortunate to have a best friend whose family had season tickets and took me to a bunch of games at Pacific Coliseum. I loved going to games and it definitely fuelled my passion to forge a career in sports media. While I wouldn’t consider myself a fan now, in the sense of outwardly rooting for the team I cover, I don’t think the passion young me had ever truly leaves a person. And please know that I most definitely want to see the Vancouver Canucks win a Stanley Cup for the city and for the incredible fan base that follows the hockey club (plus it would be amazing to cover another Cup run as I was fortunate enough to do in 2011).
As for the second question, absolutely. The past dozen years haven’t been much fun for anyone – players, coaches, executives, team staff, fans, media. You name it, and it would be hard to find many that have enjoyed a truly dark period in franchise history. Winning is fun. Playoff hockey is fun. We were reminded of that in the spring of 2024. However, there hasn’t been enough winning or playoff appearances since the height of the Sedin era. When the team is on a losing run or an individual is in a slump, it can be difficult to find new and creative ways to ask questions about the state of the hockey club. Players don’t want to be reminded that they haven’t scored for weeks or that wins have been hard to come by. That’s just human nature. But there is an insatiable demand in this market for any and all news items around this hockey club. The players know that. So they ought to be prepared on occasion to have to answer some difficult questions when they and the team are not performing to acceptable standards. I can tell you from years of experience, the Canucks locker room isn’t always the happiest place around. But one way to change the discussion points is to play better and produce wins. There are days (they are few and far between for the most part) when covering hockey feels like a job. But even on those days, it’s important to remember this is a job so many other people would dearly love to have.

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