The Vancouver Canucks have gone six months without a captain following the trade of Quinn Hughes, their longest such stint since Henrik Sedin retired.

It’s yet to be determined whether the Canucks will name a new captain prior to the 2026-27 season. If not, it’ll be only the second captain-less season in franchise history, following that aforementioned 2018-19 post-Sedin campaign. But that’s only one possibility.

The 2025-26 season concludes with the Canucks sporting a three-man set of permanent alternate captains in Filip Hronek, Brock Boeser, and Elias Pettersson. A few others, like Marcus Pettersson, filled in when necessary.

If the Canucks do name a new captain for 2026-27, it will almost certainly be Hronek. There’s some debate about whether he’s even interested in the public-facing duties that typically come with a captaincy, but in terms of on-ice leadership, he’s really the only worthy candidate. Some have mentioned Boeser as an option, but given the reality of his latest contract extension and his performance thereafter, that seems incredibly unlikely.

The seemingly simplest thing for the Canucks to do would be to keep the group as is, appoint Hronek as captain, and leave Boeser and Pettersson as alternates.

But after the disastrous last couple of seasons, that arrangement doesn’t really feel necessary to maintain, or even ‘right’ anymore. And the Canucks will have other options.

Hronek keeps a letter one way or another. If he’s not the ‘C,’ he’s the leading ‘A,’ and there’s no way around that. Chances seem best that Boeser, as the senior statesman on the team, keeps an ‘A’ himself, if only for the sake of continuity.

The team does seem to envision both Hronek and Boeser as medium- to long-term mentorship figures.

One does wonder about the ‘A’ currently attached to Pettersson. It might not be the worst thing in the world to quietly remove the assistant captaincy from him this offseason to alleviate a little more pressure and allow his focus to be entirely on restoring his on-ice game. Unfortunately, this is Vancouver, so the option of doing anything ‘quietly’ is already out the window. There’d be an immediate media firestorm and round of questioning about Pettersson being ‘stripped’ of a letter, which would somewhat defeat the purpose of removing pressure on him.

Unless Pettersson straight-up comes out and says, “I’d rather give this up myself to allow my attention to be elsewhere,” it seems best that he keep his letter for now.

If the Canucks are going to stick with Hronek, Boeser, and Pettersson as captains, one option they will have is to add to that leadership group. With Hronek as captain, the team could have rotating alternates, with two each at home and two on the road, as has been the case several times in the past.

Or, if Hronek is going to stay an alternate, a rotating cast of four or even five different ‘A’-wearers is always possible.

There aren’t too many of what we might call ‘internal candidates’ for the gig. Of the other pre-existing Canucks’ veterans, no one looks like an obvious fit. Jake DeBrusk isn’t the right kind of player, and will probably be gone soon. Drew O’Connor is a likely deadline trade. Marco Rossi is probably a little too on the inexperienced side. Filip Chytil is injured too often to consider.

One does wonder a bit about Linus Karlsson. He’s been with this organization for four seasons now, which is more than most, and he exudes many of the qualities the team would like to model for its younger players. If we had to pick someone else who was on the roster last year to pick up a letter, it’d probably be Karlsson.

Then again, Karlsson never wore a letter for Abbotsford, and it might be a bit much to ask of him in what will technically be his NHL sophomore season.

Then again, there’s another sophomore worth considering in Zeev Buium. He became a vocal leader of the team at the tail end of last season and seemed to be the public face of the positive-vibe shift that occurred. There’s been plenty of talk about him eventually assuming some sort of leadership role, and that could feasibly start as early as 2026-27.

But with a few other short-term candidates available, it may be best for Buium to wait another year or two.

Those other short-term candidates are, of course, some of the new vets the Canucks have brought in over the offseason. And with all due respect to Jamie Oleksiak and Paul Cotter, we’re primarily talking about Luke Schenn and Brendan Gallagher here.

Both have worn letters before. Schenn wore an ‘A’ back in his first stint with the Toronto Maple Leafs, and filled in elsewhere, including briefly in Vancouver. Gallagher was captain of the Vancouver Giants back in the day, and had worn an ‘A’ in Montreal since the 2015-16 season. Beyond that, both are teeming with the sort of personality the Canucks want to instill in the rest of the roster.

Schenn’s history with the Canucks, and Gallagher’s lengthy run of NHL captaincy, make it fairly easy to hand either one of them an ‘A,’ even though they’re technically new arrivals on the team. Each of them arguably makes a better fit as a captain than Boeser or Pettersson, but maybe the best arrangement is that aforementioned rotating cast, where Schenn and Gallagher come in to support rather than replace the pre-existing alternates.

We’d even go as far as to say that if the Canucks really wanted to name a captain for 2026-27, and if Hronek expressed he was not ready or willing to take the job, then naming either Schenn or Gallagher as a one-year, temporary captain might make sense. We doubt it will ultimately go in that direction, but it remains a possible, not awful, outcome.

To sum it up, a five-player official leadership group of Hronek, Boeser, Pettersson, Schenn, and Gallagher seems like the best fit for 2026-27. Whether that’s with Captain Hronek and four alternates, Captains Schenn or Gallagher with four alternates, or just four or five alternates with no official captain, it seems most likely that this will be the group.

But that’s just for now. Down the road, names like Buium, Braeden Cootes, and Caleb Malhotra will inevitably enter the mix as the rebuild continues to reshape the entire franchise.

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