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Canucks voted NHL’s worst run organization in anonymous player agent poll
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Photo credit: © Bob Frid-USA TODAY Sports
Tyson Cole
Apr 13, 2026, 17:00 EDTUpdated: Apr 13, 2026, 16:21 EDT
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On Monday morning, The Athletic released an anonymous poll of NHL player agents, asking them a variety of questions. They ranged from the best/worst-run organizations in the league to the Quinn Hughes/Cale Makar and Macklin Celebrini/Connor Bedard financial debate to what they’re expecting this year’s July 1 to look like.
And it’s safe to say that the Vancouver Canucks did not get a glowing review from agents around the league.

Q: What is the worst-run franchise in the NHL?

The Canucks received the most votes (seven) of the 22 submissions as the worst-run franchise in the NHL.
Here is what two agents told The Athletic regarding the Canucks:
“They’re a mess,” one agent said, simply. “I don’t know what their plan is,” groused another.
“They really don’t have the infrastructure that the players need to remove excuses,” added a third agent. “It just seems there’s a lot of soap opera stuff going on around there. I just think management needs to do a better job of keeping things in-house.”

Q: What is the hardest front office to deal with?

The Canucks received the second most votes (four), behind only the Anaheim Ducks (seven), as the hardest front office to deal with.
Here are more agent quotes regarding the Canucks via The Athletic‘s poll:
“No alignment with what’s happening in the organization. It just can’t get going anywhere. Just a discombobulation. Good people, nice guys, but it’s just not working. So it makes it difficult for you to manage to bring a free agent there, hypothetically.”
“Vancouver’s hard because they have no plan. How do you sell players on an organization where you can’t get a grasp of what they’re actually trying to do?”
It shouldn’t be a surprise to see the Canucks sink to the bottom of the barrel in these votes from NHL agents. When said team plummets to 32nd in the league, with a wide margin behind the next-best teams, the dysfunction is under the spotlight. And that’s what happened to the Vancouver Canucks.
In a matter of three seasons, the Canucks went from winning the Pacific Division and coming within one game of the Western Conference Finals with a bright future ahead, to having to trade one of their two elite forwards because of a mismanaged locker room feud, their Jack Adams Award-winning coach walk away, the Captain and best defenceman in franchise history forces his way out. And now they find themselves in 32nd place by a landslide, with a dim future of a lot of losing seasons in front of them.
Over the last few seasons under this regime, the Canucks’ front office has done an admirable job of moving off of bad contracts once they saw it wasn’t going to work here in Vancouver: Danton Heinen and Vincent Desharnais, for example.
Many in the market viewed this as a positive. The front office admitting when they made a mistake and quickly moving on is good for the team. However, that isn’t viewed in the same light around the league and diminishes an already fractured franchise’s reputation between the agents and players. Why would players want to sign in Vancouver if they’re so quick to ship you out of here if it doesn’t work out right away? It doesn’t garner a strong relationship with agents for future potential clients.
In what has been an already dreadful season, and quite possibly the worst in franchise history, to now come out of it with one of the worst reputations among voting agents around the league is going to make the rebuild that much more difficult.
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