Zeev Buium was the most promising young player in the Vancouver Canucks lineup last season.
Despite his being dealt midway through his first full NHL season and logging major minutes in a sewered environment for a dysfunctional team as a rookie, Buium’s hockey IQ and skill level stood out. No matter how miserable the team’s results, Buium kept trying things and kept challenging defenders one-on-one from the blue line. Off the ice, he maintained his competitive edge. It’s commendable he never seemed to accept the results.
For all of the character and skill Buium demonstrated, and for all of the pedigree he possesses as a recent first-round pick who put together one of the most impressive resumes in recent NCAA hockey history with Denver University, Buium’s profile contains some measure of fragility the Canucks will need to be thoughtful about managing.
As promising as Buium is, he remains a somewhat undersized left-handed defenceman. The 20-year-old will need to put on some weight and add some physical heft to his 6-foot, 183-pound frame to hold up in tough minutes. Given his work ethic, however, there’s little question he’ll manage precisely that as he ages and approaches his prime.
The fragility of Buium’s profile, however, is less about the heaviness in his game and more about the player archetype he could come to represent if the Canucks aren’t thoughtful about his development path.
There are, of course, left-handed defencemen under 6-1 who represent significant value at the NHL level: Quinn Hughes, Lane Hutson, Josh Morrissey and Vince Dunn come to mind as prominent examples. Those players, however, share a key common trait — they’re top-end point producers with hard-won reputations as high-end power-play quarterbacks.
On the other side of the ledger, there’s a long list of NHL lefties under 6-1 who have been consistently undervalued around the league. The Pittsburgh Penguins’ Sam Girard, for example, is a legitimate top-four-calibre defenceman. Still, he required his former team, the Colorado Avalanche, to attach a second-round pick to offload his entirely reasonable contract with 1 1/2 seasons remaining. Matt Grzelcyk was a 40-point player in Pittsburgh during the 2024-25 season and still had to wait until fall to sign a one-year contract with the Chicago Blackhawks last offseason.
Even some high-end power-play options, such as recent Stanley Cup winner Shayne Gostisbehere, have had journeyman career paths, their professional resumes littered with Girard-like trades and one-year contracts despite consistent production and performance.
This variance in Buium’s profile must be accounted for in Vancouver’s thinking ahead of this upcoming season. It’s tricky, however, because Buium will require power-play reps if he’s ever going to hit his ceiling as an NHL player. And yet Buium struggled on the power play last season — especially relative to veteran teammate Filip Hronek, who was absolutely sensational.
Hronek played just over 150 power-play minutes during the 2025-26 season and was remarkably efficient in those minutes. In fact, he led all NHL defencemen who logged at least 150 power-play minutes last season in points per 60 with 7.94. More than just Hronek’s individual success, the calibration of Vancouver’s power play and the space he opened up as a shooting threat at the top of the Canucks’ 1-3-1 formation just clicked when he was promoted full time to the top unit.
There is no sound hockey argument to remove Hronek from the top power-play unit, and yet the path to Buium’s becoming a star-level contributor requires his development into a first-unit mainstay, which he’ll never do if he isn’t given significant run in that spot. With Hronek intent on remaining in Vancouver, there is no easy solution to this logjam, but the team is going to need a sharp, considered plan.
For Manny Malhotra and the coaching staff, how to navigate Buium’s power-play usage and carve out an opportunity to feature him offensively is easily the deployment decision with the most significant long-term ramifications of this Canucks season.
2. Will Manny Malhotra have the discipline, and options, to manage Filip Hronek’s minutes?
Hronek will turn 29 in November and has a no-move clause through the conclusion of 2027-28. For now, the top-pair Czech defenceman wants to remain in Vancouver with the rebuilding Canucks. That’s admirable on some level, and it’s also his contractually negotiated right.
There is a massive gap in quality between Hronek and the other options Malhotra will have on the back end. Especially in the wake of Marcus Pettersson’s departure, Hronek is really Vancouver’s only established top-of-the-lineup option on the blue line. You can hope the likes of Buium or Tom Willander take a significant step forward this season, but hope is not a plan, and it’s rare for 22- and 21-year-old defencemen to be capable matchup options at the NHL level.
Given Hronek’s age and Vancouver’s rebuilding future, the Canucks will need to be disciplined about managing his ice time. Last season, for example, Hronek played more than 25 minutes in 19 out of 25 games after the Olympic break. In aggregate, he logged 30 more minutes than any other defenseman after the Olympics. On a per-game basis, only Zach Werenski (whose team was in a playoff race) and Quinn Hughes (whose team was scrapping for home-ice advantage) got heavier usage than Hronek.
Hronek is a tough, efficient defenceman and can handle logging significant minutes, but he’s also missed large chunks of time as a result of shoulder injuries in two of the past four seasons. In any event, the Canucks will need to find some other options to share the load. Vancouver simply has too much asset value tied up in Hronek and too little meaningful ambition this upcoming season to risk deploying him in some of the heaviest usage in the league.
It’s incumbent on Malhotra not to give in to the temptation to overextend Hronek during a rebuilding season.
3. Can Jamie Oleksiak and Luke Schenn play well enough to flip at the trade deadline?
Luke Schenn has a full no-move clause in his one-year, $2.25 million contract. Jamie Oleksiak has a relatively team-friendly 12-team no-trade clause included in his two-year, $10 million contract.
Schenn and Oleksiak are high-character players and battle-tested in the playoffs. They have the sort of profile teams generally want to add to their lineup at the NHL trade deadline when they’re planning for a long playoff run.
Defence-minded defencemen, however, are often the players whose stock falls most precipitously when they’re logging significant minutes for overmatched teams during a rebuild. You wouldn’t have known it to watch Marcus Pettersson play last season, for example, that his five-on-five defensive impact — in terms of limiting the rate at which Vancouver surrendered goals and expected goals against — was borderline elite. You just noticed how frequently Vancouver was fishing pucks out from the back of its net when he was on the ice.
As unrestricted free agents, Oleksiak and Schenn will bring solidity to the organization. There’s no questioning the level of professionalism and defensive experience they’ll be able to contribute. Can they hold up well enough, however, to maintain or enhance their trade value ahead of the trade deadline? That’s a very different question.
4. How will young defencemen fare with the coaching change?
Buium had some sensational offensive moments. Willander was productive and, on occasion, even looked like a strong second-pair transitional defenceman. It was a different story for Elias Pettersson, who struggled mightily to replicate the defensive authority he flashed down the stretch of the 2024-25 season, but his potential as a heavy, throwback defensive blueliner is obvious.
Across the board, however, all of Vancouver’s young defencemen looked overmatched night to night last season. The defensive habits were nonexistent, and elementary mistakes — allowing a free stick in the slot, missing an assignment, keeping too loose a gap through the neutral zone — were constant.
That level of performance, however, wasn’t especially alarming. In truth, the mistakes weren’t isolated solely to the younger players. The 2025-26 Canucks were nothing short of the most disorganized, confused structural team I’ve ever covered. There was simply no sense of defensive solidity, no predictability in how they executed. It was sometimes difficult to even parcel out blame when a mistake had been made, given several players seemed unsure of their role or assignment on any given breakdown.
The context of Vancouver’s structural failings makes it difficult to evaluate exactly how their younger defencemen are tracking. Truthfully, none of them performed to the level of a good NHL blueliner last season, but that’s a data point that might reveal more about the team’s environment than it does about the individual quality, form or NHL readiness of Buium, Willander and Pettersson.
We’ll wait to see what systems Malhotra implements and how it might affect Vancouver’s young defencemen. The baseline, however, is relatively low. Structurally speaking, it simply can’t get any worse than it was last season.
5. Setting reasonable expectations for Thatcher Demko
Thatcher Demko is now a 30-year-old coming off a second hip surgery, which is virtually unprecedented for an NHL goaltender, and hasn’t been able to stay healthy since a knee tear in Vancouver’s first game of the 2024 playoffs.
At this point in his career, Demko has never put together an NHL season in which he checked off all of the following criteria: A. Start 60 games or more. B. Manage an above-NHL-average save percentage. C. Be healthy at the end of the year.
Looking even beyond a lengthy injury history, he hasn’t been the same positionally perfect, athletically dominant goaltender of yore in a few years. Demko’s save percentage across 43 appearances over the past two years checks in well below the NHL average.
For the Canucks and their fans, it’s important to sit with that. It’s unreasonable to expect Demko to perform like a conventional starter, and it’s incumbent on the organization to manage his pitch count rigidly this season. For fans, meanwhile, it’s unfair to apply “Demko could ruin the tank” expectations to a goaltender who really shouldn’t start frequently enough next season for that to be a relevant part of the dialogue.
