We’ve hit the point in the offseason at which we’re fewer than two months from seeing the Vancouver Canucks hit the ice again. As of now, however, the exact shape of the team and their lineup is a little uncertain. Training Camp 2026 opens up on September 17 in Penticton, and there will be a number of spots on the roster available for players to compete over at that time.

One of the players with the most to fight for in this particular camp is Jonathan Lekkerimäki. Really, Lekkerimäki finds himself in an interesting, almost contradictory spot heading into this year’s camp. Most still count him as a top-five organizational prospect, and having just turned 22 in July, he should still have plenty of developmental runway left. At the same time, however, Lekkerimäki is about to enter his fifth post-draft season, and his fourth season of North American pro hockey, and he’s yet to really establish himself as someone well and truly ready for NHL minutes.

To say that time is running out for Lekkerimäki is probably an overdramatization, but to say he’s reaching an important crossroads in his career is accurate.

Fortunately, the Canucks themselves are in a great spot to assist Lekkerimäki in making it through said crossroads. In years past, the attitude around someone like Lekkerimäki might be more ‘sink or swim.’ Either he makes the team on his own merits, or he doesn’t, and eventually gets passed over by others within the organization.

But the Canucks aren’t in the same situation that they have been in years past. They’re now firmly in a rebuild, and the opening stages of a rebuild at that. The Canucks are still in the process of collecting more picks and prospects, and as of this present moment, there aren’t all that many forward prospects yet ready to directly compete with Lekkerimäki for time.

The 2026-27 represents an opportunity for both Lekkerimäki and the Canucks, then. It’s a chance to forget about merit for a half-second, and instead attempt to put Lekkerimäki in the best possible situation to succeed this season, so as to really see what the Canucks might have in him before deciding upon his long-term future with the team. And it might be a last chance, too, before younger forwards like Caleb Malhotra, Adam Novotny, and others start hitting the scene to push Lekkerimäki further down the depth chart.

Really, there’s little to lose and plenty to gain by putting Lekkerimäki in the best possible spot to succeed this season. The question, then, is where that spot might be?

Lekkerimäki is a scoring winger. His placement in the lineup probably starts with finding the best centre available, something that’s in short supply with these current Canucks.

The default option here is Elias Pettersson. Until proven otherwise, he’s still the 1C on the depth chart, and remains the most productive pivot on the roster.

That said, Lekkerimäki and Pettersson both like to shoot from the half-wall an awful lot, and there’s perhaps a bit too much overlap in their games for them to properly mesh. Neither is particularly fleet of foot. Neither is particularly good at digging pucks out of traffic. Were Pettersson and Lekkerimäki to form a line, you’d definitely want a particular sort of winger on their flank, and that’s also tough to find on this roster. Is it Linus Karlsson? Or Drew O’Connor? Maybe it’s Liam Öhgren?

There’s also something to be said about the potential impact on Pettersson. You won’t find many in this fanbase who don’t want Pettersson to shoot more, and putting a dedicated sniper on his wing might reasonably have the opposite effect. Plus, Pettersson’s job this season is to rebuild his own game, so adding the responsibility of also building up Lekkerimäki’s game to that is probably best avoided.

A better fit might be available in the form of Marco Rossi. He’s a solid goal-scorer in his own right, but is typically stylized as more of a playmaker, and specifically someone who makes plays from the middle of the ice, where he can often be found battling for space.

Right off the bat, there’s some appeal to having Rossi flick pucks out of the middle to the awaiting stick of Lekkerimäki on the wing. There may be some worry about a mutual lack of size here, but Rossi plays a lot bigger than his 5’9” frame, and there’s probably some good lessons that Lekkerimäki can learn in there.

Going back to other wing options, it’s hard not to like the chemistry that Rossi and Öhgren formed last year as two-thirds of the BRO line. Öhgren proved to be an excellent forechecker with some of the markings of a pseudo-power forward, and if we’re talking just archetypes, that’s the exact sort of winger that should be accompanying a duo like Rossi and Lekkerimäki. There’s also some history between Öhgren and Lekkerimäki to consider.

A line of Öhgren-Rossi-Lekkerimäki has good potential, at least on paper. Lekkerimäki even makes sense as a direct replacement for Brock Boeser on that line, with the two sharing plenty of structural similarities in their game.

There will be other options, of course. It’s possible that Lekkerimäki could find some chemistry with, say, Braeden Cootes in camp, and a scoring line could be built around that duo. And, of course, line-shuffling is inevitable, and if Lekkerimäki does make the roster, he’ll almost certainly appear in a multitude of combinations over the year. But until the players actually hit the ice, we’re sticking with the aforementioned unit as a line worth penciling in.

Where would an Öhgren-Rossi-Lekkerimäki line leave the rest of the top-six? That’s a little trickier to figure out. If Jake DeBrusk is still around, it’s easy enough to keep him next to Pettersson on the other top-six line. The other flank could go to Boeser or Karlsson, or maybe even O’Connor if the team is looking to increase his opportunities. Are these particularly exciting lines? No, but then that’s not really the point of the 2026-27 season. This is a developmental year, and if putting Lekkerimäki (and Öhgren, for that matter) in a position to succeed is all the Canucks can ‘get’ out of their top-six this year, it will still be developmental time well spent.

This is where the priorities really come to the forefront. Even if during the course of camp, Boeser continues to look like a great fit on that BRO line, it might be worth putting Lekkerimäki there all the same. It’s not about which line is going to work best in the short-term, but more about how the line arrangements are going to serve these individual players in the long-term. Finding the best fit for Lekkerimäki, then, is so much more important than finding the best fit for Boeser, or putting together the line that is going to score the most in 2026-27.

To conclude, we think the best thing to do with Lekkerimäki this year is to put him in the best possible situation to succeed, and for now, that situation would appear to be on Rossi’s wing. But until Training Camp actually gets going, it’s only theoretical.