BUFFALO, N.Y. — Even as general manager Ryan Johnson jetted off to Vancouver to take part in the formal introduction of Manny Malhotra at Rogers Arena on Thursday morning, the Canucks left a relatively large segment of their staff in Buffalo, N.Y., as the NHL Scouting Combine continued.

This is a critical draft for a franchise that owns the No. 3 pick, two first-round picks, four picks in the top 50 and 10 picks overall. Converting that surplus draft capital into a meaningful haul of valuable talent is an essential first step if the club is to move through the competitive oblivion of this rebuilding process on any sort of expedited or reasonable timeline.

As the Canucks wine and dine top-five hopefuls and interview dozens more prospects during the day at the Buffalo Marriott, the combine is only just getting into full swing. The players do the majority of their fitness testing on Saturday morning, and the top prospects do the bulk of their formal media on Friday afternoon, but already on Thursday, prospects were being shuttled around to do grip testing and other basic tests. Much of the V02 max testing will occur on Friday, in advance of the official weigh-ins, measurements and athletic testing on Saturday morning.

In the meantime, here’s some of what The Athletic has heard from several top prospects at the combine.

Viggo Björck is going to interview very well

We’ve made the case for considering Viggo Björck with the third pick in recent weeks. I haven’t heard anything to suggest the Canucks could be in the mix for him — the club didn’t plan to take him for dinner this week, but he had meetings scheduled with the Seattle Kraken and Florida Panthers, a solid indication of where his range likely is within the industry — but it’s clear that he’s rising a bit as this process winds down.

His standout performance against NHL players at the World Championships helped stabilize Björck’s stock significantly. It put to bed any concerns about his size and speed, and whether that might translate to the NHL.

Expect his stock to continue to rise. Björck is going to interview very well, and already has, in Buffalo. The skilled pivot speaks almost perfect English and is uncommonly engaging to speak with.

While he’s also likely to measure in just a hair under 5-foot-10 when the official measurements are taken this weekend, there can also be absolutely no question that he doesn’t qualify as “small” in any meaningful sense when you see him in person. Björck looks very much like a professional hockey player, with a big frame and broad shoulders. It’s no surprise that he was winning draws and board battles against NHL players just last week over in Switzerland.

“I met Nico Hischier before (we played Switzerland), and then I had the first faceoff of the game against him,” Björck told The Athletic when asked if he had an “aha” moment playing at the worlds. “So I just go up to him, look at him and think ‘OK, we’re doing this’, and then the puck dropped, and he immediately and cleanly snapped it back. After that, I thought to myself, ‘Well, I have to get my head in the game.’”

Björck did exactly that. He won his next three faceoffs to close out the first period.

“Obviously, it’s super cool to play against Ryan O’Reilly and Sidney Crosby, some of the guys you grew up watching,” Björck said about playing at the worlds. “It was an amazing experience.

“I actually tried to grab Sid on one sequence one time, but he’s super strong. His raw speed, physicality, that’s the level you’re trying to get to. Of course, Crosby is on a different planet, but I felt like I got a sense of how it’s going to be over in the NHL.”

Björck is also the brother of Canucks prospect Wilson Björck, who was a fifth-round pick in 2025.

“Of course it would be cool,” Björck answered when asked if it would be a dream come true to be drafted by the same team as his brother. “I really enjoy spending time with him, I mean, he’s my best friend. We do everything together, we hang out all the time. To play in the NHL is my dream, but to do that and to play with my brother? That’s a dream in and of itself.”

What Ivar Stenberg learned when the offence dried up in the second half

Ivar Stenberg is a very special player.

When we’re talking about Stenberg, who has a dinner scheduled with the Canucks but hadn’t attended that particular date when The Athletic spoke with him on Thursday afternoon, we’re talking about one of the most productive 18-year-olds in SHL history. A smooth, complete winger who plays well through contact, dominated the World Juniors and finished second only behind Lucas Raymond for Sweden’s senior men’s team at the World Championships last month in Switzerland.

The maturity and completeness of Stenberg’s game, in combination with his high-end skill, have him widely ranked as the consensus second-best prospect in the 2026 draft. The San Jose Sharks, however, could lean toward the back end given the unbalanced nature of their current talent distribution. And the Canucks have been closely tied to Caleb Malhotra for months with the third pick.

If the teams at the top of the draft overthink this and Stenberg falls out of the top three, the Chicago Blackhawks could have a massive steal on their hands. There’s really no doubt that Stenberg’s profile is legitimately elite.

“To play with and against NHL players for the first time, it was super fun, and I learned a lot,” Stenberg told The Athletic on Thursday when asked about his experience playing at the World Championship.

“I think when you play against Crosby and Macklin Celebrini, I mean, that’s unique,” Stenberg continued. “It was something special. Crosby tried to hit me one time, and let me tell you, I will remember that for a long time, even if nothing special happened. I just jumped away.”

There was a moment in January where Stenberg was on pace to be the most productive 18-year-old in SHL history, and fresh off being the best and most complete player at the World Juniors. From there, however, his scoring pace sagged somewhat down the stretch of Frölunda’s season.

It was a stretch that Stenberg put behind him with a point-per-game showing at the worlds. It was also a stretch that only fortified his belief that his effectiveness isn’t necessarily tied to producing points exclusively.

“Sometimes the puck doesn’t go in,” Stenberg said of what he took from that experience on Thursday. “You can play good, but sometimes you’ll have five chances and none of them go in. Other games you don’t play as well, but you score on your one chance.

“You get into those periods and just have to come out from them stronger, I think that’s an important part of hockey.

“The SHL, it’s really tough to produce points,” Stenberg added. “You just have to keep playing well, and keep playing well everywhere on the ice if you want to keep getting ice time. For me, I was playing well, I was sure of it. I can’t get too focused on the goals, and I knew in those games that I was still playing good hockey.”

The Ruck twins want to be drafted together

I don’t have a brother, but in covering Henrik and Daniel Sedin and also in covering Quinn Hughes and his brothers over the years, I’ve been able to observe that there are some primary dynamics at play with elite hockey players who are siblings.

In the case of the Sedins, they’re highly competitive with one another. They live to one-up each other in everything, whether it’s a joke in a Hall of Fame speech, locker room table tennis, pull-ups during fitness training or doing the Grouse Grind for fun.

In the case of the Hughes brothers, in contrast, they’re extraordinarily supportive of one another. Quinn wouldn’t even jokingly roast Jack and always insisted that Luke was going to be the best of the three of them. Quinn was always his brothers’ single most committed fan.

With twins Liam and Markus Ruck, who grew up Canucks fans in Osoyoos, B.C., and are projected to be picked in the late first or early second, I was curious if either dynamic applied to them.

“I’d say a little of both,” answered Liam. “We have that competitiveness, but we’re doing it to make each other both.”

“I agree. We love competing with each other and pushing each other. But we also want what’s best. I want him to do great, and I also want to do great,” echoed Markus.

The Ruck twins are identical. Harder to tell apart than Henrik and Daniel were in their 20s, and not by a little bit.

Markus is slightly more outgoing of the two and is the pass-first centre. Liam is slightly more reserved and is the lethal, heavy finisher. If you’re a long-time Canucks fan and were around for the golden era teams during Henrik and Daniel’s prime, you can’t help but immediately understand that there’s an uncannily familiar dynamic to that.

The Rucks have both interviewed with the Canucks this week, but it’s been difficult to ascertain exactly how interested the team may be in selecting one or both of them. In addition to Vancouver, who own the 24th, 33rd and 41st picks at the draft, there are other teams with multiple picks in the mid-to-late first and early second — the Calgary Flames, Washington Capitals and St. Louis Blues — who are well positioned to be in the mix to select both skilled forwards, and seem to have some level of interest in doing so.

After the combine concludes, they plan to visit colleges and will pick a program to commit to for the 2027-28 season. Their plan seems to be to spend another year in Medicine Hat and use that time to focus on getting bigger and stronger and improving their skating. They’ll have more time to do so now, too, given that they’ve graduated from high school.

“Yeah, I think that’s the plan,” said Markus.

“We talked to Gavin (McKenna) a little bit about NCAA, and he thought it was great for him to challenge himself against bigger players. His path is a little different than ours, and we’re not trying to rush things. It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. We’re not the biggest guys right now, so we have some stuff we still want to work on, and we don’t think it’ll hurt us to play another year with Medicine Hat.”

As for the Rucks, they’re not hiding from NHL teams at the combine that their strong preference is to be drafted by the same organization.

“That’s the dream right there,” said Liam. “We know it’s hard for all these teams. It’s never easy to draft two players who are similarly ranked to the same team, but every team has asked us what we think and how badly we want to be together. We do say that it is our hope, but we’ll see how it plays out. It would be cool if it does happen.”

“It would mean so much,” said Markus.