Earlier in the week, we highlighted an impending issue in the crease of the Vancouver Canucks, with Nikita Tolopilo due to run out of waiver-exempt time as of this summer, and with both Thatcher Demko and Kevin Lankinen still under long-term contract.

Then the 25-year-old Tolopilo went and put up 39 saves against the Toronto Maple Leafs in a shootout loss – starting ahead of the veteran Lankinen in the process – as if to underline the problem. This 6’6”, 229-pound behemoth of a netminder is playing like he could be a genuine part of the Canucks’ future. He’s already, in the present moment, arguably giving the team a better performance than his older teammates.

He’s looking, at the very least, like someone who would not have an easy time making it through the waiver wire during next year’s training camp. And so, Vancouver management is left with a handful of inconvenient options: waiving Tolopilo (risky), assuming Demko will remain injured (unreliable), carrying a three-goalie rotation into 2026-27 (unwieldy), trading Demko (borderline impossible), or trading Lankinen. You can tell by the lack of parentheses there that the final option is the best one, but that still doesn’t make it a particularly good one, or an easy one.

Trading Lankinen presents particular difficulties, and those difficulties vary greatly depending on the timing. Let’s go over a few potential scenarios in which a Lankinen deal might get done.

Is a trade within the 2026-27 season itself, as in between now and the March 9 Trade Deadline, a possibility? Sure, maybe, but it’s not a very good one. It’s probably not something the Canucks themselves are considering too seriously, given that Demko is out for the remainder of the season. To trade Lankinen now would entail Tolopilo taking over as the undisputed starter right away, to be backed up by someone like Ty Young or Jiri Patera, which is less than ideal, even for a team trying to tank. It seems like a guaranteed recipe to harm Tolopilo’s confidence.

Were the Canucks to pick up another veteran backup in the transaction, or perhaps pluck one of their own from the waiver wire, that might be a different scenario. But it still might not be the best time to be moving Lankinen.

Lankinen has a full no-movement clause in each of the first two years of his five-year contract extension, of which he is still playing out the first year. That means that Lankinen isn’t going anywhere he wants to go.

Then, assuming he’s willing to go anywhere, you’ve got to find a suitor that matches his list of acceptable destinations. And there just aren’t that many teams out there looking for goalies in the present situation. Almost all of the teams headed toward the 2026 playoffs have their goaltending tandem firmly in place. There are a handful of teams that would probably look for a considerable upgrade, such as the Carolina Hurricanes, Montreal Canadiens, or Edmonton Oilers, but one has to wonder whether Lankinen – with his current .881 save percentage – truly constitutes a considerable upgrade.

And a team would really have to be committed to Lankinen as that upgrade, given that he’s under contract for four more years. That precludes a team like the Washington Capitals, who are currently without both Logan Thompson and Charlie Lindgren due to injury, but who would only want a temporary fill-in.

The odds of finding a team that Lankinen wants to go to, and that both wants Lankinen and is willing to give up anything in return for him, seem low to very low within this 2025-26 season. So, the focus shifts to the 2026 offseason.

As far as Lankinen’s contract goes, nothing really changes as of this offseason. The contract enters Year Two as of July 1, 2026, but maintains its NMC throughout the entirety of the 2026-27 campaign.

Still, the offseason would at least represent a more open market for Lankinen’s services. There is an absolute boatload of starting or backup goalies hitting UFA this summer, including Sergei Bobrovsky, Freddie Andersen, Stuart Skinner, Petr Mrazek, Cam Talbot, Alex Nedeljkovic, Connor Ingram, Jonathan Quick, and Brandon Bussi. That almost guarantees a bit of a goaltending carousel, and that increases the likelihood of jobs opening up.

It stands to reason that Lankinen would be unlikely to leave a situation in which he was going to be anything less than a 1B goalie. But all the shuffling of the offseason could very easily leave a couple of such opportunities open for him, and there may at least be more destinations he’s willing to consider at that point than within the current season.

Lankinen’s NMC will still be in effect, however, and any team trading for him is still going to have to be willing to make that four-year commitment. Some sort of turnaround in Lankinen’s performance between now and him would certainly help with the latter issue, but it’s fair to say that an offseason Lankinen trade isn’t exactly easy or likely – just easier and likelier than an in-season trade.

Beyond that point, more possibilities do open up. Lankinen’s NMC ends as of July 1, 2027, at which point it becomes a 15-team no-trade clause. It thus becomes much easier to deal Lankinen at that point, but that doesn’t really do much to solve the present day issue. By July 1, 2027, Tolopilo will have had a year of waiver eligibility to deal with.

If the team thinks Demko will spend the majority of that time on LTIR, allowing the Canucks to roll with a three-headed goalie-monster during those rare periods all three are healthy, maybe it works to wait that long. Or, alternatively, if the team is willing to give up on Tolopilo as easily as they gave up Arturs Silovs this past offseason.

But if hanging on to Tolopilo is part of the plan, then parting with Lankinen by the end of this offseason, specifically, probably also has to be part of the plan. If possible, that is, and with the caveat that, in the end, it may not be.

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