Vancouver Canucks News & Rumours: Rossi, Öhgren, Chytil, Pettersson, Gallagher & Where’s the Offence? – The Hockey Writers – Vancouver Canucks

The Vancouver Canucks finished the 2025-26 campaign with the NHL’s worst record. They didn’t score enough goals, and then lost a bunch of the players who helped them score the goals they did get. That’s not the easiest way to improve an offence. The obvious question is: where are those goals supposed to come from now?

The answer isn’t going to be one player suddenly putting the team on his back. The Canucks are going to need several things to go right. Some young players have to take a step forward. A few newcomers need to give the team more than they did last season. And, perhaps most importantly, Elias Pettersson has to look more like the player Vancouver thought it was signing to that enormous eight-year contract in 2024. There are reasons to believe the offence can improve, but there are also plenty of reasons to be cautious.

The Canucks Lost a Lot of Their Offence Out the Door

Here’s the uncomfortable part of the math. Vancouver scored 210 goals last season, and a pretty big chunk of that production has now left the building. Kiefer Sherwood and Evander Kane combined for 30 goals on their own. Add in what players like Teddy Blueger, Conor Garland, Quinn Hughes and Nils Höglander contributed, and you’re looking at roughly 55 goals worth of production that won’t be walking back through the door in October.

So where does Vancouver get those goals? Part of the answer has to come from players already in the organization. Marco Rossi and Liam Öhgren each scored eight goals last season, and both will have a chance to do more. Filip Chytil is another obvious one. He scored just three goals, but staying healthy would give Vancouver a player who has shown he can contribute offensively when he’s healthy.

Then there are the newcomers. Paul Cotter and Brendan Gallagher both have produced more offence in the past than their most recent numbers suggest. Cotter scored 16 goals two seasons ago, while Gallagher had 21 the year before his production dropped to seven. The Canucks don’t need either player to become a 30-goal scorer. They just need them to be useful.

Then there’s Pettersson. He’s the team’s highest-paid forward and scored only 15 goals last season. If he could pump that number up significantly, it would make a huge difference. But expecting a bounce-back from Pettersson is more hope than a plan. The Canucks need him to be better, but they also need other players to score. If Vancouver wants to score more than 210 goals, several things have to go right at the same time.

Vancouver Has a Home-Ice Scoring Problem

There’s another number buried in all of this that I find even more concerning. The Canucks won only nine games at Rogers Arena last season and scored just 100 goals in 41 home games. That’s not what you want to see from a team trying to rebuild some excitement around the franchise.

Home ice is supposed to help. The crowd gets into the game, players feed off that energy and find ways to put teams under pressure. But Vancouver struggled to score in its own building. That’s a problem, especially as they try to establish a new identity.

And it’s not like the previous season was much better. The Canucks won 17 games at home in 2024-25, but even then they scored only 112 goals in 41 games. So this isn’t just one bad season that can be easily dismissed. They have had trouble creating offence in front of their fans for a while. A more aggressive system could help them generate chances and spend more time attacking instead of sitting back and hoping to win close games, but systems don’t put the puck in the net by themselves.

That’s why the two problems are connected. Vancouver needs more offence, and it needs to find a way to produce more of it at Rogers Arena. If the Canucks want to take a meaningful step forward in 2026-27, they can’t keep treating home games like they’re something to survive. They need to make their own building matter again.

So Where Does the Offence Come From?

And that brings us back to the bigger question. Where will the offence come from? The Canucks will need growth from their young players, healthy key veterans and more production from the players they’ve brought in. That’s a lot of boxes to check.

But they don’t need to become one of the NHL’s highest-scoring teams. They just need to find where the offence might be hiding. If Pettersson rebounds, Chytil stays healthy, the younger players take a step, and the newcomers score some goals, the numbers will improve. And if that happens at Rogers Arena, the whole team might start to feel a little different.