The Vancouver Canucks’ 2025-26 season has come to an end.
Finally.
There’s an argument to be made that this was the worst season in franchise history. Overtime wasn’t introduced to the NHL until 1982. Prior to then, any game tied at the end of regulation remained a tie.
With that in mind, the Canucks’ 15 regulation wins this season are the fewest in franchise history, and it isn’t even close. The previous low in a full season was 20 regulation wins. Heck, the previous low in a shortened season was 17 regulation wins, set in the 56-game 2020-21 season.
What an accomplishment.
But, more than anything, this season was the end of an era. The Canucks accepted the reality that years of half-cooked retools and repeated short-term plans to make the playoffs had resulted in the worst team in the NHL. They bid farewell to the best defenceman in franchise history and admitted the need for a full-scale rebuild.
A season that began with a full-fledged and entirely misguided attempt to convince said defenceman to stay instead turned towards creating hope for the future — please, please focus on the future, because the present is awfully bleak.
Whether this new era will be any different from the one that just ended remains to be seen. That will become clear over the coming weeks and months, if not years, as the Canucks’ actions will speak much louder than their words.
For now, however, we have to focus on the present or, rather, the very recent past: Thursday night’s final game of the season against the Edmonton Oilers.
It may have been game 82, but the Oilers still had a lot to play for — or “for which to play” if ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which you shall not put.
The Anaheim Ducks beat the Nashville Predators earlier in the night, moving them one point past the Oilers into second place in the Pacific Division. Finishing ahead of the Oilers would give the Ducks home-ice advantage in their first-round series in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
Moreover, the Los Angeles Kings were playing the Calgary Flames contemporaneously with the game between the Oilers and Canucks. A win for the Kings would move them past the Oilers as well, leaving the Oilers in the second Wild Card spot in the Western Conference.
That would leave the Oilers facing the Colorado Avalanche in the first round.
But the Oilers were in charge of their own destiny. Even a single point from an overtime or shootout loss would secure second in the Pacific and home-ice advantage in the first round.
So, this game had significant stakes for the Oilers, and they were highly motivated to get a result.
The Canucks…well, they were less motivated.
Playing for pride and to establish a culture for the future can only take you so far. The Canucks already got the end-of-season result they were looking for when they won their final home game, giving their home fans some small consolation for one of the worst home records in NHL history.
That game was the climax; this was the denouement.
The result was the 2025-26 Canucks season in microcosm: the Canucks were badly outplayed, got outshot 35-to-11, and lost by a lopsided 6-1 score.
The season ended the same as it ever was when I watched this game.
One more. Just one more. You can do this, Daniel.
Note to self: remove the above bullet point before publishing. And remove this bullet point too. Or keep both bullet points in for some meta humour.
It became immediately apparent that the Oilers, unlike Sabertooth, were not playing around, as they opened the scoring just two minutes into the game. A chaotic 3-on-3 rush resulted in a Trent Frederic tap-in when Kevin Lankinen bit on a shot that was never coming and Kirill Kudryavtsev was a second too late to tie up Frederic’s stick.
A few minutes later, Matt Savoie made it 2-0 with his first of three goals. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but the Canucks’ defensive zone coverage was a mess.
…
Sorry, I stopped because you definitely had heard that one before. Off a defensive zone faceoff, the Canucks got caught chasing the Oilers all around their own zone. Eventually, Marco Rossi lost track of his man, Savoie, who was all alone at the back door for a pass from Evan Bouchard that he took from his skate to his stick and shot into the open net.
The lone highlight of the night for Canucks fans was Ty Mueller scoring his first career NHL goal on Curtis Douglas’s first assist as a Canuck in the last game of the season. It’s always nice when we get some firsts with our lasts.
The play started with Kevin Lankinen playing the puck up the boards, then it popped to Douglas in the middle when Aatu Räty took a hit to keep the puck moving. Douglas lofted the puck into Mueller’s path, and he neatly controlled the puck with his skate, then beat Connor Ingram five-hole with a deke to the backhand.
Mueller was rewarded with a classic big-guy/little-guy hug. Even if Mueller isn’t that little at 5’11”, the 6’9” Douglas makes anyone look like a little guy.
“I just saw Dougie coming up the ice with control,” said Mueller. “The weak side of the ice was open, and he made an unbelievable flip — landed right on my stick. Then I just tried to open the goalie with a move and was able to slip it through.”
It was a lovely first goal for Mueller, made even better because he’s from Alberta. Sure, he’s from Cochrane, Alberta, which is over three hours away from Edmonton, but still. Alberta. He also played Junior A hockey for the Sherwood Park Crusaders in essentially an Edmonton suburb, so it was a bit of a homecoming.
“It’s super special,” said Mueller. “The fact that I was able to have some family here and do it against the team I grew up cheering for, it’s something I’ll never forget.”
The Oilers made it 3-1 just a couple of minutes later on the power play. A Drew O’Connor pass couldn’t connect on a shorthanded 2-on-1, and the Oilers counter-attacked 3-on-2. Connor McDavid drew in Tom Willander because he’s Connor McDavid, then he fed Savoie for another tap-in goal.
Before the end of the first period — yes, this all happened in one period — McDavid gave Savoie a hat trick. On a delayed penalty, Savoie casually disappeared from view like La Fantasma, and was ludicrously open when McDavid fed him a backhand pass for the 4-1 goal.
That was basically the game. The Canucks didn’t have much in the way of pushback — no, Elias Pettersson and Drew O’Connor fighting a couple of Oilers doesn’t really count, except perhaps for morale. They managed just three shots on goal in each of the second and third periods. The lops were sided.
Ryan Nugent-Hopkins made it 5-1 on the power play in the second period when he batted in a rebound after McDavid drove to the net. Then Colton Dach made it 6-1 in the third period after the Canucks got trapped in the defensive zone. It doesn’t matter. The season’s finally over. We are released.
Also released, apparently: Patrik Allvin. Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet is reporting that Allvin was fired as Canucks general manager shortly after the game ended. He gone.
That’s not overly surprising after the team fell apart on Allvin’s watch and especially when he was so passive at the trade deadline, failing to do anything creative to acquire more draft picks. In order to properly execute a rebuild, the Canucks need a general manager who can make bold moves and there was never anything bold about Allvin.
I am very tired, y’all. This has been an emotionally draining season in multiple ways. I am so grateful to all of you for reading, even as the season got increasingly more depressing. I did my best to uplift when possible, criticize when appropriate, and lighten the mood with the silliest (and dumbest) jokes and pop culture references that popped into my caffeine-addled brain. Thanks for joining me for the ride.
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