It’s the bleakest three-word description for any team in North American professional sports: Playoff bubble team.
Generally, when we talk about sports, and the evergreen offseason topic that surrounds projected team quality (“Can this team make the playoffs?” or “Can this team win a championship?”), we usually sort the teams in question into one of several tiers.
There are contenders, who demand our attention.
There are young teams on the rise, who might not be ready to win big just yet, but they’re ascending and kinetic
Then there are the *sad trombone* rebuilding teams, who are going through a process, one that keeps free agents away and the bean counters back-of-house up at night.
Now you might think that it’s worse to be a rebuilding team than a playoff bubble team, but that’s a failure to understand the dynamic of this cycle.
The playoff bubble team exists outside of the cycle entirely. The young team on the rise doesn’t become a playoff bubble team on its way to becoming a contender. It’s not a middle rung on the ladder.
It is, instead, a bottleneck or a waste basket that teams unintentionally fall into. A dismissive tier that we sort teams into when their stock appears to be stuck.
When contenders get long in the tooth or have their depth hollowed out by cap or financial constraints, that’s when they fall into the tier of a playoff bubble team. A young team on the rise, meanwhile, becomes a playoff bubble team when it repeatedly fails to launch.
There’s a sense of fragility in the very description of a playoff bubble team. To be on the bubble, after all, means that at any moment, you’re liable to pop.
The Vancouver Canucks have lived on the playoff bubble for much of the past 15 years, and that’s where they find themselves once again this summer.
The club’s prosaic projected perch in the NHL hierarchy is reflected in the betting markets, where the Canucks are currently listed at +116 to qualify for the 2026 Stanley Cup playoffs, an implied probability of 46.3 percent.
Nine Western Conference teams have shorter odds of qualifying for the postseason than Vancouver does at this point in the offseason, including the eight teams in the West that made the playoffs in 2025 and the ascending Utah Mammoth.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, not after the Canucks’ Pacific Division-winning 2023-24 campaign. This is a team, after all, that boasts one of the most impactful individual skaters in the sport. Going into last season, Vancouver looked like it had escaped the cursed, liminal space of the playoff bubble team.
Everything, however, broke against the Canucks last season — from unprecedented injuries to a preseason cancer diagnosis, from family tragedy to a personality clash that both transfixed the hockey world and caused the club to jettison its top forward.
Even with all of the injuries and challenges and all of that noise engulfing the club, the Canucks were still able to amass 90 points and finished the campaign seven points out of a playoff spot (six points out plus the tiebreaker). If Vancouver needed everything to go right to be a playoff team in 2023-24, as president Jim Rutherford so memorably put it, it took just about everything going wrong for Vancouver to miss this past campaign.
Such is life on the playoff bubble.
In thinking about where this team stands in the dog days of summer, and what sort of run out the club will require to get back on track this upcoming season, I wanted to build a roadmap of what specifically the Canucks need to have occur or accomplish to return to the postseason.
Elias Pettersson needs to be a star performer again
Whether it was the knee injury, offseason preparation, the overwhelming drama that surrounded the team last season or some combination of all of the above, Canucks centre Elias Pettersson lacked juice last season.
This is a player who can dominate shifts, and entire games when he’s on. A ruthlessly efficient finisher who regularly drives play for his team and has both a 100-point and multiple 30-goal seasons under his belt.
For whatever reason, that it factor that Pettersson has usually brought to the rink was almost entirely absent last season. Really, it’s been absent for about a year and a half now, dating back to the 2024 All-Star break.
And it’s not just qualitative observations, either. His shot velocity has been down, and so has his skating speed. He’s won fewer battles, and has regularly looked indecisive and non-threatening in attacking situations.
It’s not that Pettersson has been outright poor. His effort level has mostly been there, especially in the defensive zone. He’s still managed to drive play reasonably effectively at five-on-five, albeit against a reduced level of competition. He’s still found ways inside the opposition’s defensive structure, and he’s continued to draw a ton of penalties in the process.
All of that is well and good, for a solid second-line centre.
Pettersson, however, needs to be much more than a player of that calibre if the Canucks are going to get back to the postseason. He needs to be a difference-maker up front, and play with the sort of swagger that’s required to break open games and inspire teammates.
We’ve seen play at this level before. In fact, he’s more often been a star-level game-breaker throughout his career than not. We’ve also seen him work through extended periods of baffling form before, too.
If the Canucks are going to reach their ceiling, they’ll need Pettersson to find his way back to stardom once again.
Stay healthy, or at least healthier
NHL players hate to discuss the impact that injuries play in shaping outcomes in public. In the “next man up” culture typical of an NHL locker room, injuries are viewed as an inevitable fact of life and a factor that can never, ever be used as an excuse.
That’s both understandable and commendable, but injuries and injury luck are often a significant factor that explain what we see throughout the season and into the playoffs. During the 2023-24 campaign, when Vancouver won the division, almost all of its top players were available and relatively healthy for the entirety of the regular season. Last year, however, it was a very different story.
Thatcher Demko missed the first six weeks of the season with a lower-body injury and sustained two additional injuries that kept him out for an extended period of time. He played fewer than 30 games.
Quinn Hughes sustained an oblique injury about 50 games into the year, and then sustained some compensation injuries while working his way back, prolonging his absence. Hughes gutted it out toward the end of the season, but wasn’t quite at his previous level of transcendent dominance down the stretch.
Filip Hronek missed six weeks with a shoulder injury. Dakota Joshua missed time as a result of a testicular cancer diagnosis and the surgery required to address it, then sustained another lower-body injury just as he was rounding back into form.
J.T. Miller took a 10-game personal absence. Pettersson got hurt late in the year, as the club’s fate as a non-playoff team was sealed. Filip Chytil sustained a head injury late in the season and didn’t appear in a game thereafter.
By the end of the season, Vancouver ranked in the top 10 in the NHL in man games lost. The impact of those injuries, however, was even more severe given the stature and weight of those Canucks players who were impacted.
Some better injury luck would go a long way in helping Vancouver bounce back next season.
The Adam Foote factor
Adam Foote has big shoes to fill given how Rick Tocchet impacted Vancouver’s five-on-five game across the past two and a half seasons.
The Tocchet effect was sharp in-season when he took over from Bruce Boudreau, and that impact was largely sustained throughout his tenure. Even with some of the patchwork lineups Vancouver was icing down the stretch last season, Tocchet’s Canucks regularly found ways to control play and defend at an extraordinarily high level. His teams almost always seemed disciplined and well prepared, even if the negative style they played grated on fans when the wins stopped coming.
With Tocchet opting to depart Vancouver and join the Philadelphia Flyers this summer, the Canucks elected to promote Foote, his assistant coach and close friend, to serve as the 22nd head coach in franchise history. It’s a significant roll of the dice, both because Tocchet’s work in Vancouver was mostly excellent and because this is Foote’s first professional assignment as a head coach.
In fact, Foote only has one season of head coaching experience at even the major junior level. And his one year with the Kelowna Rockets didn’t go especially well; he was relieved of his duties midseason in a year in which the Rockets were hosting the Memorial Cup.
Obviously, Foote’s work managing the defence for Vancouver across the past two and a half seasons speaks for itself. Under Foote’s watch, Hughes levelled up to become a Norris Trophy winner, Hronek established himself as a high-end top-pair defender, Tyler Myers has played some of the best hockey of his career and any number of depth defenders have performed ably for Foote when called upon.
Rutherford and company also hit on an inexperienced AHL head coach in Manny Malhotra last summer. It was a hire that seemed like a big dice roll at the time and was clearly a home run, as the Abbotsford Canucks won the Calder Cup in Malhotra’s first season behind the bench.
The Canucks will need Foote to hit the ground running, and be the right man for the job. Certainly, there’s a lot of reason to believe that Tocchet was able to extract an awful lot from this team, and a playoff bubble team can’t afford to have that edge blunted if they’re pursuing a playoff spot.
Maintain gains on the penalty kill
Over the course of the past few seasons, the Canucks turned an Achilles’ heel — their four-on-five play — into a significant strength.
It’s been a phenomenal turnaround, one that peaked last season when the Canucks finished with the third-best penalty kill rate in the NHL (although their goal differential performance short-handed — which is the most important metric, even if it’s not the one most commonly cited — was more top 10 than it was elite).
Down the stretch, in particular, the Canucks penalty kill became a significant asset. One that helped them hang around in the playoff race, despite the significant injuries and distractions that besieged them.
If Vancouver is going to be able to hit a good run out this upcoming season, it’ll need to maintain the gains made on the penalty kill with a new coaching staff and in the absence of a pair of key penalty killers — Pius Suter and Joshua — who departed via trade or free agency this summer.
Replacing Suter, in particular, in short-handed situations could prove to be a tall task. His defensive intelligence and partnership with Teddy Blueger as a first unit were critical in Vancouver’s penalty killing success last season. The club has other stout defensive forwards — Conor Garland, Pettersson and Kiefer Sherwood are all candidates to fill in for Suter’s short-handed role to begin next season — but Suter’s defensive play was special.
Finding a way to continue to succeed short-handed with diminished options is going to be crucial for the Canucks.
Get elite goaltending
This is the big one, as it so often is in hockey.
Over the past several seasons, the Canucks have yo-yoed between being a top-10 NHL team by save percentage and being a team toward the absolute bottom of the league by team save percentage. Those peaks and valleys, understandably, have tended to coincide with seasons in which Demko is able to play in 50 games or more.
The Canucks have invested heavily in net across the past six months, signing Kevin Lankinen to a five-year extension ($4.5 million cap hit) and Demko to an extension that will make him one of the highest-paid netminders in the league despite his struggles — with both consistency and injury — last season. In Lankinen, the club is hoping that it’s added some floor to shore up the year-over-year volatility that the club has dealt with in net. In extending Demko, the club is hoping that it’s a bet on a leader capable of being one of the most dominant puck stoppers on the planet when he’s healthy and available.
Based on what I’m hearing about the club’s plans for a split in net, we should expect Demko to play in the neighbourhood of 50 games this upcoming season with Lankinen appearing in the other 32 or so.
Of course, the best laid plans can change rapidly. Behind the Demko and Lankinen tandem, the club will have Nikita Tolopilo and Ty Young — neither of whom has played an NHL game — as its AHL battery, but may lean on veteran puck stopper Jiri Patera — who has NHL experience — as the first-choice third goaltender at the NHL level in the event of injury.
The Canucks are still working through exactly where Patera will play this upcoming season and how they’ll manage their surplus of depth goaltending options. Can your third goaltender really jump into NHL action if they’re staying in rhythm playing for ECHL Kalamazoo?
In any event, if the Canucks get saves next season, they’ll have a chance to punch above their weight. Vancouver is betting heavily that it’ll be able to rely on quality goaltending. Now, it’s on the Demko and Lankinen partnership to help carry this team to the postseason.
(Photo of Thatcher Demko and Elias Pettersson: Jeff Vinnick / NHLI via Getty Images)
