By now, you’ve heard the news. The Vancouver Canucks have locked up 32nd place in the 2025-26 NHL standings. Thus, they’ve also locked up the best odds of any NHL team at winning the draft lottery on May 5th, giving them the best odds at landing Gavin McKenna or Ivar Stenberg at first overall.

The Canucks didn’t leave much doubt that they’d get here, either. Heading into play on Friday, there is a 12-point gap between teams 31-20 in the overall NHL standings. In other words, it’s anyone’s guess what happens to the middle of the draft lottery odds and order between now and the final two weeks of regular-season games. There might even be some movement among the three or four teams ahead of the Canucks in the standings.

Meanwhile, the Canucks have a 16-point gap between them and 31st overall Blackhawks. This is what a masterful tank job looks like. No more mushy middle. No doubt about who the worst team in the NHL is. The Canucks are number one.

But how did they get here?

And we don’t mean that in the sense you might think. We won’t be talking about carnival wheels, Colin Campbell, or locker room feuds. Instead, we’ll be looking at this season in isolation.

Heading into the season, most expected that the Canucks would be at or near a coin flip to sneak into a Wild Card spot. Their first six games of the season supported that thinking. After winning their home opener against the Calgary Flames, the Canucks lost to the Oilers and Blues before rattling off three straight wins against Dallas, Chicago, and Washington.

A 4-2 record after their first six games. Unfortunately, it took them 10 more games to earn their next four wins.

The Canucks’ lack of depth at centre was one of the most talked-about stories surrounding this team heading into 2025-26. That depth was put to the test almost immediately, as in game number six, Filip Chytil went down with yet another head injury after taking a massive hit from Capitals forward Tom Wilson.

The next game, the Canucks’ forward lines looked like this:

DeBrusk-Pettersson-Garland
Bains-Sasson-Karlsson
Kane-Räty-Sherwood
O’Connor-Aman-LaBate

If you look at those lines, you might also remember that on top of Chytil, the Canucks were without Brock Boeser, Teddy Blueger, and Jonathan Lekkerimäki very early into the season. Injuries were quickly defining the Canucks’ first couple months of the season.

The Canucks won just two of their final six games to close out the month of October. In November, the Canucks won just four of their 12 games. On November 5th, they fell 5-2 to the supposedly rebuilding Chicago Blackhawks on home ice. While it was still early in the season, this game seemed to be a real turning point in the way fans viewed this year’s team. If everything went right, they were likely a coin flip to be a playoff team. But with everything going wrong, this team had to finally embrace what fans had long been calling for. It was quickly becoming undeniable that the Canucks had to take a step back if they hoped to build a team capable of sustainable long-term success.

On November 24th, Elliotte Friedman reported that the Canucks were willing to listen to trade offers for their veteran players, but not captain Quinn Hughes. In a conversation with Patrick Johnston of The Province, Jim Rutherford clarified that what the Canucks were really willing to do was get ahead of trading their pending UFAs, the players they would be presumably looking to trade ahead of the March Trade Deadline.

This, of course, was not the Canucks admitting that they needed to rebuild or that they would be trading any of their veteran players with term still remaining on their deals. And as they made clear, they were certainly not going to be trading Quinn Hughes anytime soon.

Things kept going south for the Canucks. After just four wins in November, the Canucks opened December by losing four of their first five games. On December 4th, they fell to dead last in the NHL standings for the first time in a long time. Behind the scenes, captain Quinn Hughes made it clear that he wasn’t planning on sticking around, and on the ice, a few late-stage JT Miller-esque effort level shifts made it clear that the Canucks needed to get Hughes out sooner, rather than later.

And so on December 12th, far sooner than anyone expected, the Canucks dealt Hughes to the Minnesota Wild. In return, they got prized prospect defenceman Zeev Buium, forwards Liam Öhgren and Marco Rossi, along with Minnesota’s 2026 first-round pick.

This is a safe space. We won’t hold it against you if you almost talked yourself into believing that by subtracting a disgruntled Quinn Hughes and adding new young and exciting players to the Canucks’ lineup, that they might be able to turn this around quicker than we thought.

The Canucks won their first four games of the post-Quinn Hughes era. In the Canucks’ first game without Hughes, Zeev Buium picked up a goal and an assist against the New Jersey Devils. The perfect Hughes replacement! Then the Canucks shut out the Rangers, Islanders, and Boston as their East Coast road trip roared on. They were defending better than they had all season, Thatcher Demko looked unbeatable, and they were getting goals all throughout their lineup.

Despite that, the market still had a meltdown (and rightfully so) when, in an interview during the first intermission of the Canucks’ December 22nd game against the Flyers, Patrik Allvin described what the Canucks were doing as a “retool with a hybrid form.”

That was especially concerning given that this market — and two past Presidents of Hockey Operations — had been asking for a proper rebuild for years, and just when it finally looked like the organization would be forced into one with the Hughes trade, they were right back to using more of the same language we’d heard over the last decade.

A few weeks later, with the fanbase still up in arms over the mixed messaging coming out of the Canucks’ organization — and with just one win over their next eight games — both Rutherford and Allvin clarified the Canucks’ direction and said that the team is rebuilding.

The Canucks traded their leading scorer in Kiefer Sherwood when they dealt him to the San Jose Sharks for a pair of second round picks back on January 19th. Naturally, this weakened their team even more.

The Canucks won just two of their 16 games in the month of January, and this is where the free fall to somewhere below the basement of the league standings really began. The Canucks limped into the Olympic break with two losses against Utah and then Vegas, and upon returning to play, they picked up right where they left off, rattling off four more losses before beating Chicago on March 6th.

Ahead of the trade deadline, the Canucks managed to move off of both Conor Garland and Tyler Myers, loading up on draft picks in the process. In the 12 games they’ve played since the deadline, the Canucks have amassed three wins, one of which came on home ice.

On the year, the Canucks have lost 45 games in regulation, and an additional eight times in extra time. They remain the only NHL team without double digit wins on home ice this season, with just eight of their 22 wins on the year coming at Rogers Arena.

And while this might all sound like a bad thing, it really isn’t meant to be. We wanted this team to finally accept reality, trade veterans, tank to the bottom, get a high pick in this year’s draft, and have the patience to rebuild this team without taking ceiling-lowering shortcuts. We have no way of knowing if that shortcut to chase that sweet sweet playoff revenue is coming. Hopefully it’s not.

But what we do know is that the 2025-26 Canucks accepted their fate, weakened their roster, and left little doubt that they’d lock up the best odds at this year’s draft lottery.

Now we await the next chapter of this story.

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