The Canucks hired Manny Malhotra this summer, and nobody needed a reminder that faceoffs were supposed to be his thing. As a player, he built a reputation on the dot, and his 56.36% career winning percentage still sits 27th all time in NHL history. That background has already shown up in practice, with clips of Malhotra going head-to-head with his own players as he teaches the craft.
But through 16 games of 2026-27, Vancouver’s faceoff results are not where many would have expected them to be. The Canucks are winning just 46.5% of their draws, which is fifth-worst in the league.
Last season’s Adam Foote-coached group was at 49.3%. That’s a noticeable drop, and it comes in the one area that seemed most likely to improve.
The biggest reason is the roster change that hit the middle of the ice hardest: Aatu Räty is gone. He was first a healthy scratch, then traded to the Toronto Maple Leafs, and his absence has changed the whole picture.
Räty wasn’t just good on faceoffs - he was elite. His 59.09% all-time faceoff win rate ranks fourth in NHL history, behind only Yanic Perreault, Zenon Konopka, and Joe Nieuwendyk.
He also has the kind of ambidextrous ability that makes him even more valuable in that role.
Last season, Räty took 777 faceoffs for the Canucks and won 60.5% of them, handling many of the key situations. This year, he was around long enough to take just 44 faceoffs, winning 56.8%. Once he was out of the mix, those responsibilities shifted to other centres who simply don’t bring the same level of certainty.
That helps explain why the team numbers have slipped, but it doesn’t mean every Canuck has gone backward. Marco Rossi has actually improved under Malhotra, moving from 49.6% last year to 51.8% this season.
That’s the first positive rating of his career. Max Sasson has made an even bigger jump, climbing from 42.1% to 45.6% while taking a much larger volume of draws.
Filip Chytil’s numbers have gone the other way, dropping from 49.2% to 46.7%. There’s a clear explanation for that in the source material: he suffered a shoulder injury in the preseason, and that has to affect faceoff work.
Elias Pettersson’s decline is more pronounced, but it comes with a heavy workload attached. He was at 47.5% last season, slightly above his career average, and he’s down to 45.1% this year.
The bigger issue is how much more often he’s being asked to do the job. In 2025-26, he took 1,353 faceoffs across 74 games.
In 2026-27, he’s already at 337 in just 16 games, a pace that would push him past 1,700 over a full season. No other NHL centre has taken more faceoffs this season.
Pettersson is also taking on a lot of the work Räty used to handle. He’s being used in the offensive zone, defensive zone, and neutral zone, on both his strong side and his weaker side.
Last year, Räty often stepped in for the toughest draws. This season, Pettersson is the one carrying that load, and that helps explain both his individual dip and the team-wide slide.
There’s also the schedule to factor in. Vancouver has played nine of its 16 games on the road, and road teams don’t get the same faceoff advantages as home teams.
The home side gets the stick-down-last edge on neutral-zone draws, plus the benefit of last change, which can create better matchups. As the Canucks settle into a more even home-road split, their faceoff rate should rise a bit.
So the cleanest read is this: the Canucks haven’t really become a worse faceoff team under Malhotra so much as they’ve managed to hold their ground after losing one of the best faceoff men the sport has ever seen. That’s not nothing.
Rossi and Sasson are trending in the right direction. Pettersson is taking on more responsibility, even if the raw percentage hasn’t caught up yet. And with only 16 games in the books, plus a long road trip that cut into practice time, there’s still plenty of runway here.
For now, the Canucks are still playing the long game.
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