There is just one more game remaining in the Vancouver Canucks‘ 2025-26 season, and that news is elating for most fans in the market.

Not only are Canucks fans ready to turn the page on this season, but the players and all the higher-ups within the organization are also firmly focused on the future. But who among those higher-ups in the organization will have a say in what that future looks like is the biggest question as the season winds down.

There have been multiple conflicting reports as to who stays and who goes. And quite honestly, I’m not sure that matters. What does matter is that something does happen.

There needs to be repercussions for the way the season has gone. And this conversation would be different had the Canucks been planning on rebuilding heading into the year. But they weren’t. They wanted to make the playoffs and win for Quinn to entice their captain to stay. It’s hard to fault them for doing their best to keep potentially the best player in franchise history.

But the way they went about doing it is what you can fault them for.

Take when they realized they weren’t going to improve the team enough in free agency to intrigue Hughes, for starters. After misreading the market, they re-signed Brock Boeser at the 11th hour and extended Conor Garland and Thatcher Demko as soon as they could. “Hey, if we can’t bring anybody in to help the team, we’ll at least extend your friends in hopes you don’t want to leave them!” type of energy.

And as we know, none of that worked. The Canucks’ struggles out of the gate were the last straw, and Hughes worked with the Canucks to find him a new home.

But Hughes’ desire to leave wasn’t news to them. Following the trade, President of Hockey Operations Jim Rutherford said that in the offseason, it was indicated to them that Hughes was highly unlikely to sign long-term with Vancouver.

Yet, they still went ahead and handed out those extensions. Heading toward a rebuild, they were luckily able to move off of one of those contracts in Garland. However, in hindsight, one wonders whether the Canucks could have maximized their return better, rather than settling for second- and third-round picks? With some of the prices thrown around at this past deadline, that seems likely. And with yet another Demko injury, they likely couldn’t get a big return on him, but could they have signed him to a much less lucrative contract? Again, that seems likely.

Now, the Canucks wound up with an underwhelming return and are stuck with $8.5 million on their books for an injury-prone netminder for the next three seasons. All because their last-ditch effort to keep Hughes, when they already knew he was highly likely to move on, didn’t work out. That’s on Rutherford and Patrik Allvin.

The head coach’s hands aren’t clean of this mess, either. Was he set up to succeed? No. He wasn’t given the necessary pieces to thrive. But where he does find fault is in his inability to adapt to his surroundings.

Throughout the season, Adam Foote would cite previous departures and injuries as the main factors behind his team’s plummet to the bottom of the NHL standings. But every team has to go through those challenges every season. And it’s a coach’s job to learn how to adapt to those situations. He failed to do that.

Did he always have the proper replacement in the lineup that could help fill in when needed? No. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to tweak something in the team’s system to offset the loss in the lineup. But throughout the year, he seemed to stick to his structures and systems a little too long, which led to many of the on-ice results.

Coming into the season, we saw Foote’s systems in training camp. It was a very aggressive approach, in which he had his players swarm the puck carrier in both the neutral and defensive zones. And the rest of the players in the defensive zone would play a man-on-man system. It didn’t work from the start, but when more than half of their blueline were either rookies or had fewer than 80 NHL games under their belts, he stuck with that process. And they were getting exposed; it was starting to kill the young kids’ confidence, and they weren’t progressing as they should.

To play devil’s advocate, that can be fine at points, because it allows the young players to learn from their mistakes and what not to do. But when there are no adaptations in said system, even when it’s clearly not working with the crop of players in the lineup, it can create bad habits and cause young players to regress rather than progress, thus lowering their projected ceilings instead of raising the bar.

And we aren’t trying to pile on Foote here. He’s clearly a very smart hockey mind. One can see that when he breaks down plays, he knows what he’s talking about, although that message may not always translate the way he intends. In his playing days, he was regarded as one of the best defensive defencemen in the league, and his aggressive, physical style of man-on-man defence worked for him, so that’s what he’s trying to teach as a head coach. However, he was not given the correct personnel on this Canucks team to flourish in that type of system. The Carolina Hurricanes play a similar style, but they headhunt players from around the league and bring them in, knowing they’ll excel in that situation.

Foote never had that luxury in Vancouver. Given the type of team the Canucks have and the direction they’re heading, it just doesn’t seem like the right fit. A lot of fans in the market want to keep Foote because they want to continue losing. Regardless of who the bench boss is, this team is going through a rebuild and will continue to lose. What fans want to see is if the players are continuously developing so they can be a part of the solution. And in this case, we find it hard to believe that anyone can confidently say that any of the young players have consistently shown they are improving in this situation.

In his interview process, Foote sold management on a vision of how they could get back into the playoffs and be good enough to keep Hughes. A few short months later, they now find themselves in dead last in the NHL by a landslide.

Everybody is at fault here. Foote did not live up to the vision he presented, and management did not surround him with enough talent to do so. Take the hockey side out of this situation. If someone at their job does not meet their work expectations, there are ample reasons for their departure. There shouldn’t be any difference of opinion because this is professional hockey.

But that isn’t always the case. If there is a change, the next regime won’t be doing much winning either. However, the outlook on the team has changed. The team is now rebuilding, and losses are expected. That wasn’t the case coming into this year.

So any thought of running it back with the same regime that turned this team from a Pacific Division Champion to the laughingstock of the league in less than two years is completely unfathomable. Going into next season, what will the organization sell to their fans about the franchise’s new vision and future if the necessary adjustments are not made?

There are conflicting reports of what will happen to the three in question, but having no repercussions for this torturous season would be asinine. Somebody has to pay for what has happened this season.