Canucks 2025 offseason moves: Where are they better? Where are they worse?

New York Times

11-07-2025

Despite enduring a season of significant upheaval, the Vancouver Canucks were relatively quiet this offseason. Especially by the usual standard of activity that president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford and general manager Patrik Allvin have established in previous summers.
The Canucks had hoped to do more. The ambition was to upgrade down the middle and more fundamentally reimagine the team's forward group.
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As the logic of this new era of salary cap growth worked its way through the NHL, however, the marketplace was seized up by a talent crunch. Very few top players even made it to unrestricted free agency. The usual cap pressures from the flat cap era were absent, giving teams more options to bide their time and eliminating the need for creative problem-solving that had driven player movement for the past five years.
Instead of trading draft picks and moving aggressively to upgrade significantly down the middle, the Canucks changed tack. They used their draft picks, made one relatively low-cost trade and extended some of their own players, including a surprise reversal to retain Brock Boeser after the free-agent market had already opened.
There is clearly still work to be done to upgrade this roster, and Canucks hockey operations leadership will surely spend the summer exploring their options and sifting through the free-agent bargain bin in search of further reinforcements. With the meat of the offseason already in the rearview mirror, however, it's time for us to wade into the weeds on whether or not this roster has improved, by how much and where the holes remain using Dom Luszczyszyn's Net Rating model.
When the model looks at Vancouver's roster in comparison with how it looked prior to the draft and free agency, it basically sends back the meme of Pam from 'The Office' telling corporate, 'They're the same picture.'
Vancouver's biggest offseason move was, essentially, to retain its top unrestricted free agent.
The Canucks' biggest offseason acquisition was a forward capable of playing at the top of the lineup, but best suited to playing in the middle six. Their biggest offseason departure was, similarly, a forward capable of playing at the top of the lineup, but best suited to playing in the middle six.
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Despite the relative stasis of Vancouver's lineup at this stage of the offseason, what's most important for our purposes in analyzing what this minimal rate of change really means is that the Canucks are returning a team that's very similar to the one we've seen play across the last four years, with a few meaningful tweaks.
Since the 2021-22 campaign, Vancouver has had Elias Pettersson, Quinn Hughes, Conor Garland and Boeser while Thatcher Demko, when healthy, has served as the starting goalie throughout those seasons.
There have been some impactful departures to the supporting cast, most notably Bo Horvat and J.T. Miller, but also players like Nikita Zadorov, Andrei Kuzmenko, Elias Lindholm and Ilya Mikheyev, and some impactful additions, most notably Jake DeBrusk and Filip Hronek, but also players like Marcus Pettersson and Evander Kane. The spine of this group, however, has been constant across the past four seasons, and over the past 16 months, most of that core, aside from Hughes, of course, has been extended long-term.
Now, the consequences of long-term extensions in the cap growth era are unlikely to be as harsh and unforgiving as they were during the flat cap era. With the system awash in cap space and teams desperate for talent, salary liabilities aren't nearly as immovable today as they were three years ago. Even inconvenient contracts for cap-strapped teams, like Mason Marchment's, Viktor Arvidsson's or Kane's, netted returns on the trade market this summer.
The Net Rating model, however, rated the Canucks' lineup as middle-of-the-pack entering this offseason. And it still views the Canucks as a middle-of-the-pack calibre side in the wake of this summer's activity to this point.
Before proceeding to the specifics, let's note some key qualifiers and explain the methodology behind this exercise.
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First off, the big-picture goal of this annual article isn't to compare last season's Canucks to the roster they're set to ice at the outset of the 2025-26 campaign. We're not going to see how this club looks today versus some hypothetical roster if Vancouver had never traded Miller, for example.
No, what we're trying to do here is hone in on how much the true talent level of this Canucks roster has improved as a result of the decisions made and the work completed by hockey operations leadership so far this summer.
As a result, we're not going to project any changes in the effectiveness of various players due to aging, improvement or injury status. There have been no significant ice time adjustments in the data, and age-related vacillations in projected value are already baked into the numbers you'll see in the 'Before' and 'After' images that will make up the bulk of our analysis.
It's worth noting, too, that this is based on an early run of the Net Rating model, and more information will get filled in at a later date as preview season approaches in late August and early September, information that accounts for projecting power-play ice time distribution, for example. As such, it's possible that Vancouver's rating will change somewhat over the balance of the offseason, regardless of whether or not the club makes any further additions.
Also, while Vancouver's Net Rating has changed by only a tenth of a percentage point, it's worth noting that the change to the defensive and offensive Net Rating is equal. There's a rounding issue dictating this, which explains the number you'll see in this header and the identical ones you'll see below.
Lastly, and this part is critical to note whenever we use the Net Rating model (or its precursor Game Score Value Added), a model is simply one tool — and a blunt instrument at that. It is not the end-all, be-all. It is a baseline projection of a team's true talent level that we can try to lean on for the purposes of having a better understanding of how Vancouver's offseason, to this point, has altered the club's short-term trajectory.
It goes without saying that I've long since heavily valued the outputs of Luszczyszyn's model given that it has a lengthy track record outperforming all other publicly available projection systems in hockey and, usually, the betting markets as well.
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With that noted, it's worth remembering that hockey is a wildly unpredictable game played by imperfect human beings. A team's fate over the course of an entire season will be influenced by any manner of factors that a model can't project for or anticipate, from team chemistry to injuries, confidence-boosting hot streaks and confidence-shattering droughts.
Our purpose isn't to suggest that this data should take precedence over those very real human factors, it's simply to take a look at Vancouver's offseason through the lens of an industry-leading model to see if it might help us better understand what the Canucks have accomplished so far this offseason, and how that might shape the rest of this summer and the campaign upcoming.
All right, with that out of the way, let's proceed.
Below is what Vancouver's lineup would've looked like this upcoming season if the club had decided to run back the exact same roster without making a single change.
And once we sub in Kane for Suter, and promote Aatu Räty and Elias Pettersson, the defender, into the lineup, this is what Vancouver's lineup looks like in the wake of an uncharacteristically quiet showing at the draft and in free agency.
To summarize the differences: There aren't very many.
The Canucks are largely returning the same lineup, which includes a very solid goaltending tandem, a high-end defence corps and a forward group that is very much a work in progress. While the model prefers Suter to Kane, especially on the defensive side of the puck, it also views Kane as a somewhat significant offensive upgrade for Vancouver.
Overall, the model views the club's offseason changes as being of modest impact. This is a team that is largely in the exact same spot today as it was in mid-June.
While the changes that Vancouver made this offseason were superficial, all told, the bump that the club receives offensively as a result of swapping in Kane for Suter is material.
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Suter is a talented and reliable five-on-five goal scorer, a forward who legitimately scored at a higher rate at five-on-five than his more heralded teammates like Miller and Pettersson over the past three seasons. Still, Suter's offensive impact isn't nearly as significant as Kane's is, and that goes beyond goal scoring, although Kane is a legitimately high-end five-on-five goal scorer and a top-10 NHL forward by shot rate over the past four seasons as well.
Effectively there's an argument to be made in interpreting this data, one that's given weight by our qualitative opinion of watching this Canucks team try to generate scoring chances last season, that even if the model prefers Suter to Kane outright, Kane could be a better fit for the Canucks given their overall defensive level and their desperate need for scoring juice.
While Kane's attacking talent gives Vancouver an overall offensive boost, the loss of Suter removes a really high-end defensive contributor from the lineup, and that's felt heavily in terms of the club's defensive rating, and especially the defensive rating of the forward group.
The impact of Suter's loss might be a more significant one than the model can anticipate. The model, after all, can't perfectly anticipate the value that Suter provides as something of a fireman in the lineup, capable of pitching in wherever he's needed and raising the Canucks' floor as a first-line left winger, or second-line centre, or third-line right winger, or whatever is required in any given game.
In Suter's absence, frankly, Vancouver's forward group looks relatively pedestrian defensively. In fact, the Net Rating model ranks Vancouver's forward group as below average on the defensive side of the puck relative to the rest of the league, as a result of swapping in Kane for Suter.
Despite the defensive impact of Suter's loss on the defensive solidity of Vancouver's forward group, the model likewise struggles to really price in the potential impact of Vancouver's younger defenders — like Elias Pettersson, or Tom Willander, who the model wouldn't have a Net Rating score for yet given that he hasn't played a game of professional hockey yet — on the back end.
The Net Rating model understands that Vancouver's blue line is both the engine of this team and one of the league's most dynamic blue-line groups. However, if Pettersson and Willander are the sorts of precocious difference-makers that the Canucks expect them to be, there's a path to Vancouver icing one of the best defensive units in the league.
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There's a ceiling outcome for Vancouver's blue-line group that the model can't anticipate as it stands, but is absolutely worth noting.
The Canucks entered this offseason with significant needs up front, and those needs remain. Instead, they largely focused their efforts and cap resources on returning and locking up a group of players that, together, have consistently formed a fringe playoff-calibre team.
Under the hood, the Net Rating model is actually somewhat higher on Vancouver's playoff chances than the betting markets are. In early summer runs of the model, it envisions there being four truly elite teams in the Western Conference (Vegas, Edmonton, Colorado and Dallas), a fifth very strong team (Winnipeg) and a tier of three playoff hopefuls that includes the Canucks, and also St. Louis and Los Angeles. The Net Rating model views Minnesota and Utah as being a tier beneath those three wild-card striver class teams.
It's an interesting dynamic to consider overall, especially because the model is bullish on a Pettersson bounce-back and squarely views Demko as a high-end goaltender. So, a lot of the bull case material that you can make for Vancouver punching above its weight is already priced into the model.
What the model can't really anticipate, however, is the impact of Vancouver's young players. If players like Räty, Willander, Pettersson and perhaps some of Abbotsford's Calder Cup champion personnel can be impact contributors, Vancouver has an out to exceed the model and our expectations this season, despite the lack of transactional movement this summer.
(Photo of Tyler Myers, Elias Pettersson and Evander Kane: Derek Cain / Getty Images)