The good news is that two teams with marine animal-themed logos have begun to rise up the Pacific Division ranks through the early going of the 2025-26 season. The bad news is that neither of them is the Vancouver Canucks.

As of this writing, the Anaheim Ducks sit atop the division with 23 points in 16 games, which is also good for a tie for second overall in the league. While their success is not quite ‘out of nowhere,’ it has arrived much sooner than anyone anticipated. Last year, the Ducks finished with the third-worst record in the Pacific Division at 80 points, a full 16 points out of the playoffs.

But while the Ducks’ come-up is happening sooner than expected, it is happening in the exact way that many suspected it might eventually, which is the maturation of their young draft picks into genuine NHL stars. The 21-year-old Leo Carlsson has broken out into 26 points in 16 games, which has him tied for second overall in the league. The 22-year-old Cutter Gauthier has 20. The 20-year-old Bennett Sennecke, one year removed from being surprisingly selected at third overall, has 11 points in his first 16 NHL games. The 25-year-old defender Jackson LaCombe is quickly becoming a true number one blueliner. And 25-year-old Lukas Dostal is proving to be a better-than-average starting goaltender.

There are some signs of an eventual comedown. Anaheim is currently scoring goals at a way higher rate than their Expected Goals say they should, which means their possession game is a little weak and they’re probably enjoying some puck-luck. But at the same time, the age of their core contributors means that, as the numbers even out, the Ducks should keep getting better and better.

This is, in other words, not a temporary rise, but a team becoming great in a way that should be sustainable for a number of years, even if there are some step-backs along the way.

That’s also the case, albeit to a slightly less immediate extent, for the San Jose Sharks. As of this writing, the Sharks are tied for third place in the Pacific with 19 points through 17 games. That’s not near as impressive as the Ducks’ record, but then the upswing has been an even more extreme one for the Sharks.

The Sharks finished the 2024-25 season dead-last in the league, and it wasn’t particularly close. Their 56-point record trailed even the second-last Chicago Blackhawks by a full five points. San Jose was as in the basement as any team could be.

Flash-forward to today, and the Sharks are on pace to double that point total in 2025-26. And, much like the Ducks, they’re doing it on the backs of their rapidly-maturing young talent. The 19-year-old Macklin Celebrini is tied with Carlsson for second in league scoring with 26 points in 17 games. The 20-year-old Will Smith has 17 in 17. The 23-year-old William Eklund has 11 points in 13 games. And that’s not even including 19-year-old defender Sam Dickinson or recent second overall pick Michael Misa, both of whom are gaining comfort at the NHL level as their team succeeds around them.

The Sharks, like the Ducks, have shown some indicators that this is possibly just a hot start, including a similarly high PDO and a wide gap between their Expected Goals and the actual amount of goals they’re scoring. But, like the Ducks, the Sharks can look forward to the natural upswing that comes with their young players entering the earliest days of their prime years. Except the Sharks are even younger, on average, than are the Ducks.

Both teams are better already than most thought they’d be, and they look like they’ll only get better from here for the next long while.

So, what does that mean for the Vancouver Canucks?

Nothing good, unfortunately. Just as some of the established powers in the Pacific Division seem to be waning – with the Edmonton Oilers and Vegas Golden Knights both off to so-so starts – here come two new upstarts to immediately fill that void. For a moment, there, it looked like if the Canucks could build a successful roster around Quinn Hughes, Elias Pettersson, and Thatcher Demko, they might be able to slip into a window of contention as the Oilers and Knights slipped out of theirs. But that certainly hasn’t come to fruition, and the sudden rise of the Ducks and Sharks creates an obvious feeling of ‘too little, too late.’

Even if the Canucks were to extend Hughes, and even if all their own key prospects found ways to contribute directly to the NHL team over the next couple of seasons, it’s hard to imagine them putting together a roster that can realistically compete with what is happening elsewhere in the division. Here come the Ducks and Sharks, each already stacked some four-to-five young stars deep, and over the next few seasons, those young stars will be entering the prime productive years known as their early-20s.

The most optimistic scenarios have the Canucks staying a smidgen ahead of these two upstarts over the next season or two, based almost solely on the fact that the Vancouver core is more well-developed. But, for one, the Canucks are not even currently staying any sort of ahead of the Ducks or Sharks. And, on top of that, these next couple of seasons are the ones in which the Oilers and Golden Knights will still be direct threats.

It’s starting to get tight in the Pacific Division, and it’s starting to get tougher and tougher to imagine the Canucks competing within it.

And that’s the most optimistic scenario. Should the unthinkable happen, and should Hughes leave via trade or free agency? Well, then, that would have to be the death knell of any hopes of staying ahead of Anaheim and San Jose. That would be a scenario in which the only real recourse would be to attempt to get even younger than the Ducks and Sharks and attempt to start catching up with them from the either side of the equation – in other words, finally, a rebuild of some sort.

What the rise of the Ducks and Sharks really means for the Canucks is a greater degree of difficulty. That includes a greater degree of difficulty in any attempts to climb back up the Pacific Division standings this year, and what feels like an increased degree of difficulty in doing so in every year to come now for the next several.