Thatcher Demko is back.

Back on the ice, that is, and back to playing NHL games, with Tuesday’s overtime loss to the St. Louis Blues being his first action since April 21 of last year. (That’s a gap of 233 days, or almost two-thirds of a year!)

But back as the starting goaltender of the Vancouver Canucks?

That’s another matter.

Given the length and mostly unprecedented nature of Demko’s popliteus injury, chances are that the team would want to limit his starts in any scenario, at least in the early going of his return. But then there’s also the Kevin Lankinen factor. Signed to help Arturs Silovs cover Demko’s absence, Lankinen has instead turned in one of the best goaltending performances of the 2024/25 season, and has no doubt earned the opportunity to play as much as is possible moving forward.

All of which helps to raise a question that was going to get asked anyway: just how much is Demko going to play from here on out?

Today, we’re going to use the Canucks’ remaining schedule to try to make an estimate. Keep in mind, we’re not actual soothsayers, and these predictions are going to assume that both Demko and Lankinen stay healthy, which keeps them splitting the crease and keeps Silovs down in Abbotsford, rebuilding confidence.

Demko missed the first 25 games of the regular season. That’s a little less than a third of the season, but it leaves 57 more regular season games on the table, including the one Demko played on Tuesday.

Evenly split, that’d put Demko at 29 starts to Lankinen’s 28 from here on out, which sounds pretty reasonable. A slate of 29 starts would be the lowest amount Demko has made since his official rookie campaign of 27 starts in 2019/20. It’d be a little more than half of what Demko started in 2023/24.

But that’s just an even split, and chances are that the rotation will prove more complicated than that.

Let’s imagine that the goal is to start Demko as much as possible from now onward. That’d be a controversial plan, to be sure, and not one we think the team would either implement or announce. But let’s imagine so, for hypothetical purposes.

Lankinen would still have to pop into the crease to cover back-to-backs. There’s no way Demko should be allowed to play two nights in a row.

The Canucks have one back-to-back in December, two in January, two in February, one in March, and one in April. That’s only a total of seven games, and obviously Lankinen is going to play more than that.

There’s that old notion that matinee games are hell on goalies to consider, as popularly promoted by the likes of Roberto Luongo and John Garrett. Let’s also avoid playing Demko on those, then. The Canucks have one afternoon game in December, zero in January or February, two in March, and one in April (though that one’s also part of a back-to-back.) That’s just three extra non-Demko games for a total of ten, and that’s not going to work. Ten further games for Lankinen is too few, and 46 more starts for Demko is probably too many.

And if we flip this hypothetical around to playing Demko as little as possible, so as to keep him rested, we can all agree that ten games would be too few.

The real answer should come somewhere in between that and the straight-up 50/50 split we described earlier on.

The February gap for the 4 Nations Face-Off will also add a layer of complicated. Already, most of the Canucks (with the exception of Lankinen, Quinn Hughes, JT Miller, and Elias Pettersson) will already have 13 days off between games.

There might be an impetus to have Lankinen start both the game going into the break (February 8 against the Toronto Maple Leafs) and the game coming out of it (February 22 against the Vegas Golden Knights) so as to give Demko a full two weeks of rest. It’d be well-timed, coming approximately two months after Demko’s return and a little less than two months ahead of the playoffs.

But then, with Lankinen actually headed to the tournament to represent Team Finland, maybe the opposite will happen, and Demko will play those games. Maybe, after two-thirds of a year off, Demko will want to play those games, to reduce the amount of time in between starts as much as possible in a year that’s already had it’s fair share of off-days.

One thing we can be sure of that it won’t be as simple as ‘riding the hot hand,’ as goaltending decisions usually are. We can expect Lankinen to continue playing well and, in the early going at least, probably playing better than Demko overall. Demko does have a lot of rust to shake off, and he’s also adjusting to a new, semi-permanent injury. Even if Demko has had a tough start or two, and Lankinen has not, Demko will still need to get back into that crease sooner rather than later. So many of the Canucks’ hopes as a team rest on Demko being at his best, and getting him back to his best has to be a primary goal.

That’s the balance Rick Tocchet and Co. will have to strike. The fine line they will have to walk. Demko needs to start often enough to reasonably have time to rebuild his stamina, his confidence, and his game But he can’t start often enough to get worn down, or to risk reaggravating what he’s been able to rehab. The Canucks also have an impetus to use what they have in Lankinen and his current standard of play.

One potential option? Starting Demko as often as possible against playoff-bound teams, and leaving Lankinen to clean up the rest. It’s been well-documented how the Canucks’, and thus Lankinen’s, record against playoff teams leaves a lot to be desired. That would split the remaining schedule not quite in half, but close to it, with the difference favouring the playoff opponent/Demko side of things.

The real answer as to the goaltending rotation, of course, will not stick to any particular pattern, and will instead be an ongoing decision made before each and every game. But the bounds are at least clear, and they say that Demko should start between about 20 and 35 more games from now until April, with ideally none of those starts being back-to-backs or matinee games.

The rest remains up in the air.