Just how bad is this season going to get for the defending Calder Cup champion Abbotsford Canucks?

A few bright spots did emerge for the Canucks this weekend on a two-game trip into San Jose. Number-one goaltender Nikita Tolopilo returned from a month-long injury absence and gave the Canucks some of the experience that they had desperately lacked with him out. Defenseman Victor Mancini and forward Jonathan Lekkerimäki came back as well. The power play also continues to excel, ranking third in the AHL at 28.1 percent and coming through twice on four chances Saturday. But a team can’t live on the power play alone, and they place 31st in the league in scoring at 1.78 goals per game.

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• Can The Defending Calder Cup Champion Abbotsford Canucks Save Their Season?

And after a 5-3 defeat to the Barracuda on Friday night and falling behind 3-1 on Saturday, they did rally to force overtime.

But that loss Friday was gruesome. Abbotsford let a 3-2 third-period lead slip away and managed just three shots in those final 20 minutes. Then they missed out on a badly needed point Saturday when Filip Bystedt sliced through the neutral zone and the Canucks before slipping the winner past Tolopilo just 71 seconds into overtime.

The Canucks officially hit the quarter-point of their 2025-26 season Saturday night with a 4-3 overtime loss to the Barracuda. That defeat came as the team’s 15th in its past 16 games (1-12-1-2). They sit at the bottom of the Western Conference with a 3-12-1-2 mark that has them nine points below the Pacific Division playoff line already.

Abbotsford has just one win against a team at .500 or higher this season – that was a 4-3 shootout decision at home against the Barracuda on Nov. 12. But sandwiching that win were a pair of 7-0 losses. The Barracuda blew them out in the opener of that two-game set in Abbotsford. Then the Canucks went to San Diego to start this six-game road trip and took another 7-0 beating back on Nov. 15. This trip still has two more games to go for the Canucks, who will be in Tucson this coming Friday and Saturday. Then it’s back home for a pair of two-game visits from the Calgary Wranglers and Coachella Valley Firebirds.

Abbotsford’s issues have not been a mystery at all – offseason personnel losses, recalls prompted by injuries to the parent Vancouver Canucks, and injury issues on the AHL roster as well have left this team on the brink of falling out of realistic playoff contention before December arrives.

Those offseason departures pounded the team’s 2024-25 championship roster hard, starting with standout goaltender Artūrs Šilovs going to the Pittsburgh Penguins in a trade this past July. That deal yielded a fourth-round pick and defenseman Chase Stillman, who has been limited to just six games with Abbotsford so far. Defenseman Christian Wolanin, a standout on the Abbotsford blue line for last spring’s championship run, just signed a professional tryout deal with the Providence Bruins, one of the AHL’s top teams. Another forward, Tristan Nielsen went to the Colorado Eagles, produced nine goals in 16 games, got an NHL deal, and is with the Colorado Avalanche now.

The original goaltending plan had Abbotsford going with a Tolopilo-Jiří Patera tandem. Then Tolopilo got hurt, and Patera eventually went off to Vancouver as the NHL club dealt with Thatcher Demko going out. Aku Koskenvuo, Jonathan Lemieux, Ty Young, and even emergency back-up CJ Kier all filled in for Abbotsford to varying degrees of success. Head coach Manny Malhotra opted to go with Tolopilo on back-to-back nights this weekend. AHL teams typically split starts between two goaltenders when playing consecutive nights. But Abbotsford needs wins right now and does not have the luxury of alternating goaltenders. Tolopilo is their top option, so he played.

When the goaltending goes, even a strong AHL roster can struggle. This is a grind-it-out type of league, and outscoring defensive issues rarely works out in this league.

But the impact of this season so far for Abbotsford goes far beyond wins and losses. Vancouver’s future could be at stake as well. Last season forward Danila Klimovich put up 25 goals. He had an overtime winner in Game 1 of the Calder Cup Playoffs. Added a key tying goal in the team’s Calder Cup-clinching Game 6 victory at Charlotte. Now he has yet to score through 16 games this season. This is a 22-year-old second-round pick and a key figure for a Vancouver organization that does not have an abundance of top prospects. Kirill Kudryavtsev, a seventh-round pick, had an excellent rookie season and emerged as a top-four blueliner with a lot of support around him. His development continues, but he is tasked with trying to anchor a blue line that lacks a top-end option.

Vancouver needs Klimovich, Kudryavtsev, Lekkerimäki, Mancini, Sawyer Mynio, and others to come through and become everyday NHL players. Losing complicates that mission, particularly if an AHL team is pushed out of contention months early and misses the Calder Cup Playoffs. That second-half stretch drive and postseason play each provide repeated opportunities to play high-pressure hockey.

Any goaltending alternatives are difficult to find right now as some of the final remaining unsigned names have found jobs. Dustin Tokarski took a tryout offer with the Grand Rapids Griffins. Malcolm Subban signed with Czech club HC Dynamo Pardubice. Zane McIntyre, just released by the ECHL’s Tahoe Lake Monsters this past week, does have considerable AHL experience and also spent the 2019-20 season in the Vancouver organization. Chris Driedger, who spent last season with the Charlotte Checkers and Manitoba Moose, was released by Traktor Chelyabinsk on Sunday. While Driedger has struggled, he is also a goaltender who took the Coachella Valley Firebirds to the Calder Cup Finals just 17 months ago.

So, how bad can this get?

Abbotsford was a sub-.500 team last season as the midpoint approached. A bad loss at Laval rattled them sufficiently that they put together an excellent second half and carried that play all the way to a Calder Cup title. Many of the players from that roster are elsewhere now.

That team saved its season, but a season can unravel quickly in the league. The Bridgeport Islanders endured a dismal 15-50-4-3 march last season that had them out of contention before the season had barely started. That was .257 hockey.

These Canucks are playing at a .250 clip, and time quickly is becoming limited. 

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