When Kevin Lankinen signed a five-year, $22 million extension with the Vancouver Canucks in February 2025, he was fresh off a red-hot start to his Vancouver tenure and did so based on where the Canucks’ future in goal seemed headed.

Thatcher Demko had just one year remaining on his own five-year deal. Arturs Silovs was fresh off an impressive two rounds of work in the Stanley Cup playoffs and was a few months away from a Playoff MVP performance leading the Abbotsford Canucks to a Calder Cup championship.

Everything was lining up for a Lankinen-Silovs tandem to take the mantle from Demko in 2026. But some late-season struggles for Lankinen appeared to spook the Canucks front office. The lack of confidence was high enough that they quickly spun around and handed Demko his own three-year extension worth $8.5 million per year the moment they could.

That’s how the Canucks ended up having to trade a goalie of the future to the Pittsburgh Penguins for pennies on the dollar, and put Lankinen in a position where he was demoted to the 1B goalie again, despite having a longer-term contract than the 1A. But it’s a problem that solved itself, albeit in the worst way possible.

Lankinen’s 2025-26 was a mixed bag, thanks largely to the circumstances surrounding him. Let’s take a closer look.

After starting the season essentially splitting starts with Demko, Lankinen’s role with the Canucks got muddied very quickly when Demko’s injury history flared up again in November.

Thrust back into the number one job, Lankinen posted a 4-10-3 record from October to early December, helping keep the Canucks afloat through the Quinn Hughes trade. After Demko returned and took the bulk of the starts in December, it gave Lankinen some crucial rest periods before the real gauntlet began. In mid-January, Demko was forced to have hip surgery, ending his season and putting Lankinen back in the spotlight for good.

Lankinen did his best with the roster in front of him, but only reached double digits in wins at the very end, going 11-27-5 in 43 starts. While he started six fewer games than the previous season, Lankinen had a lot more work than in his first season in Vancouver. A lack of depth left Lankinen – and to a lesser extent, Nikita Tolopilo – with the unenviable task of trying to steal games for a team giving up the second-most High Danger Scoring Chances in the league, according to Natural Stat Trick.

Lankinen’s .876 save percentage was the seventh-lowest among the 68 NHL goalies who played at least 1000 minutes. While Lankinen worked to plug the leaks, the lack of goal-scoring support in front of him and a porous defence guaranteed that even at his best, he wouldn’t steal them a whole lot of games.

One aspect that he did really well in was the shootout. In fact, Kevin Lankinen is arguably the greatest shootout goaltender in NHL history. With 53 saves on 60 shootout attempts, he holds the NHL record for the best save percentage in shootouts (.833) with at least 40 shots attempted. He won all five of his shootout appearances, including stopping the first 18 shooters he faced. It took Macklin Celebrini to finally beat him in the Canucks’ third-to-last game, and even that ended in a Lankinen win.

Lankinen and the Canucks are in an odd position for the foreseeable future. While Lankinen has proven to be a more than serviceable option as the club’s 1B, his numbers consistently dip when he’s forced to take on a full starter’s workload. But given Demko’s injury history, he’s likely going to continue seeing 40-50 games a year throughout the remaining four years of his deal.

The good news for both sides is that the Canucks don’t need Lankinen to steal games in their current state. Keeping a rebuilding team as competitive as possible is good enough, and Lankinen has the capability to accomplish that. His aggressive style of play and strange shootout prowess provided some much-needed fun in an otherwise terrible Canucks season. And with a lot of losing still on the horizon, they’ll be calling on Kevin Lankinen a lot to provide some light in the tunnel.