Kevin Lankinen may have walked away from the Vancouver Canucks’ season opener with the win, but he didn’t get the assist some thought he earned.
The Canucks opened the 2026-27 season with a 6-5 overtime victory over the Edmonton Oilers, and the first goal of the night sparked a small scoring controversy. Paul Cotter was credited with an unassisted goal, but plenty of eyes landed on Lankinen’s blocker save as the key touch that set the play in motion.
John Shannon of the 100% Canucks With Woodley & Shannon podcast said Vancouver did ask the NHL to revisit the scoring and consider giving Lankinen the helper. The play came when the 31-year-old turned aside Leon Draisaitl with his blocker and redirected the puck, leading to the shorthanded goal. Shannon explained the league’s response this way: "The league reviewed it and what happened was, the league feels that if a goaltender makes a save but does not have the intent of passing the puck to a teammate than it is not a pass and therefore not an assist."
That’s where the debate starts to get messy. On the skater side, the NHL has long been willing to credit an assist when a puck caroms off a body part and ends up on a teammate’s stick for a goal, so long as it isn’t an intentional hand pass. By that logic, a bounce is a bounce, whether it comes off a skate or a blocker.
In this case, Lankinen’s stop sent the puck directly to Cotter, and there was no change of possession or extra touch along the way. That’s why the argument exists in the first place: the puck moved from goalie to goal with no interruption, yet the assist stayed off the board.
If the league were to treat goalies the same way it treats skaters on these kinds of plays, Lankinen would have been handed the eighth assist of his NHL career. As it stands, the Canucks netminder was left with the save, while the scoring sheet credited Cotter alone.
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