Of course, the preseason matters. It matters a great deal to certain individuals. Every year, exhibition games can and do make the difference in someone finally achieving their dream of making the NHL – or in the opposite direction, as they wind up being cut from the team.

But beyond that player-by-player basis, does the preseason ever really matter at the team level?

Here’s something we can all but guarantee: regardless of the record that the Vancouver Canucks end up with in this upcoming 2025 NHL preseason, fans and media alike will jump to many conclusions about it. And yes, that’s present company included. But does the preseason actually presage anything at all about a team’s performance in the regular season to follow?

Someone named Matt Desfosses looked into this a year ago, in September of 2024, through a leaguewide lens. Their Medium article crunched the numbers and found that, in short, an NHL team’s preseason record has minimal correlation with their regular season record, and that said correlation has been on the decline over the past decade.

Their research was quite thorough, enough so that they found that even the extremes – as in extremely good or extremely bad preseason results – still don’t have much predictive power over the regular seasons to come.

But you’re on CanucksArmy, and we’re not here for a leaguewide lens. Instead, we like to hyper-fixate on the Canucks, so let’s take a deep dive into the last decade of Vancouver preseason records and see what we find.

(This time around, we’re also going to look at each season’s October record in particular, to see if preseason records have anything to do with hot or cold starts.)

2014-15 Season
Preseason Record: 5-2-1 (.688)
October Record: 7-3-0 (.700)
Regular Season Record: 48-29-5 (.616)

The 2014-15 Canucks were on a mission to return to the playoffs after two seasons without, and that mission began in September.

Here’s something odd about this set of analysis: our two strongest correlations are in the first season we’re looking at, and the last. The rest don’t really line up at all. But in 2014-15, the Canucks turned a strong preseason into a strong October into a strong regular season, with each record in turn being over .600.

These Canucks did indeed return to the playoffs, only to bow out in one round against the Calgary Flames. It’d be a long time before they returned again…and they’ve still yet to have another preseason this good.

2015-16 Season
Preseason Record: 4-3-1 (.563)
October Record: 5-2-4 (.636)
Regular Season Record: 31-38-13 (.457)

Fans might reasonably have been excited that the Canucks were going to build on their playoff return in 2015-16 after a decent preseason gave way to another fairly dominant October. This time, however, the wheels fell off, and the Canucks soon started to lag behind the rest of the Western Conference.

In the end, they were second-last in the Pacific Division and missed the playoffs by a full ten points. But you wouldn’t have guessed that from the way they started!

2016-17 Season
Preseason Record: 3-2-2 (.571)
October Record: 4-4-1 (.500)
Regular Season Record: 30-43-9 (.421)

The 2016-17 season is the first where we see a slow and steady decline. The Canucks were barely above .500 in the preseason, then exactly .500 in October, and then worse off from there on out. In this season, the Canucks’ only stints above .500 came in exhibition and then again in the month of January. Other than that, it was a real recession of a season.

The Canucks would finish the year with an 0-5-0 run in April, end up last in the Pacific Division but, hey, at least they got to draft Elias Pettersson.

2017-18 Season
Preseason Record: 4-3-1 (0.563)
October Record: 6-3-2 (.636)
Regular Season Record: 31-40-11 (.445)

This is now three years in a row where the Canucks have teased their fanbase with an above .500 record in the preseason – and a hot October start, to boot – only to see their hopes dwindle as the season wore on.

These Canucks missed the playoffs by over 20 points, and somehow didn’t end up last in their division or with a particularly high draft pick – they were slotted at seventh overall. Thankfully, they still wound up with the best player in the draft anyway in the form of Quinn Hughes.

2018-19 Season
Preseason Record: 1-6-0 (.143)
October Record: 8-6-0 (.571)
Regular Season Record: 35-36-11 (.494)

Perhaps the Canucks heard about their trend of getting hopes up too high in the preseason, so they decided to do the opposite for 2018-19. This was easily the Canucks’ worst exhibition result of the decade, but, oddly enough, the team followed it up with a slight improvement on previous regular seasons.

This time around, the Canucks were a lot more consistent, ending up with better-than-.500 records in October, December, January, March, and April. They still missed the playoffs, but only by nine points, and were clearly on the upswing again – despite only picking up a single preseason win.

2019-20 Season
Preseason Record: 4-4-0 (.500)
October Record: 8-3-1 (.708)
Regular Season Record: 36-27-6 (.565)

That consistency did not last into the 2019-20 season. These Canucks were particularly mercurial. After a dead-even preseason, they put together their best October in recent memory, then a cruddy November, then a strong January and February, and then a middling February and March. It was as-of-yet-unclear whether these Canucks would truly make the playoffs when the pandemic struck and the remainder of the regular season was cancelled. In the end, Vancouver got to enter the playoffs via a play-in series, and wound up making it through two more rounds before falling to the Vegas Golden Knights.

So far, we’ll note that this is the season in which the Canucks’ preseason record most closely matched their regular season record thus far (.500 to .565), though that’s going to be beaten by a season later on our list.

2020-21 Season
Preseason Record: Cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

There were no preseason games at all in the 2020-21 season, which should more properly by called the “2021 season,” is it did not get going until January.

2021-22 Season
Preseason Record: 2-5-0 (.286)
October Record: 3-5-1 (.388)
Regular Season Record: 40-30-12 (.561)

We had a season of steady decline earlier in 2016-17 season, and now we get the opposite with a slow, steady climb. These Canucks turned the second-worst preseason of the decade into a slightly better, but still second-worst October of the decade, and then…got better. November was their last sub-.500 month, they went 8-1-1 in December, and kept their head above water in every month thereafter.

Ultimately, the climb wasn’t enough to get the Canucks out of the hole they’d already dug, and they would end up missing the playoffs by five points. But based on their start, even that’s a decent-sized accomplishment.

2022-23 Season
Preseason Record: 2-3-2 (.429)
October Record: 2-5-2 (.333)
Regular Season Record: 38-37-7 (.506)

The 2022-23 campaign was among the weirder in Canucks. A middle-of-the-road preseason led into another awful October – their worst of the decade – and the Canucks were beginning to develop a reputation as a slow-starting team. They rallied for decent Novembers and Decembers before falling into the doldrums for January and February. Then, they pulled off a 10-3-2 run in March that very nearly pushed them back into a playoff spot – but they couldn’t maintain it through April.

These Canucks missed the playoffs by 12 points, and were largely seen as having taken a step back from the near-success of the previous season.

2023-24 Season
Preseason Record: 2-3-1 (.417)
October Record: 6-2-1 (.722)
Regular Season Record: 50-23-9 (.665)

This was – with apologies to the 2019-20 squad – the best Canucks team of the decade, hands down. But you wouldn’t have guessed it from the preseason, where they had slightly worse results than the year before, and their third losing record in a row.

They turned that right around into a truly dominant October, going from their worst first month of the decade in 2022-23 to their best, and this time they didn’t really look back. These Canucks only had a losing record in one month – February – and otherwise cruised to the top of the Pacific standings, back into the playoffs, and even to the brink of defeating the Edmonton Oilers in Round Two.

2024-25 Season
Preseason Record: 3-2-1 (.583)
October Record: 4-2-3 (.611)
Regular Season Record: 38-30-14 (.549)

It’s odd, but our most recent example is also our most consistent. The 2024-25 campaign featured both the closest correlation between the preseason and regular season record (.583 to .549) and the second-closest correlation between the preseason record and October’s record.

That consistency, unfortunately, didn’t really pay off for these Canucks. They only managed a losing record in one month of the season – going 6-7-2 in January – and yet still missed the playoffs by six points.

Conclusion

Whether we’re talking about the Vancouver Canucks in specific or the NHL as a whole, the conclusion is largely the same – success in the preseason means a lot for individuals, and very little for teams.

There’s not even a consistent link between preseason performances and October records that we can find.

So, as you enjoy the 2025 NHL preseason, feel free to react and overreact with the rest of us, but just know that aside from sussing out who’s making the opening night roster, there’s little other real meaning to be found there.

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