Filip Chytil’s 2025-26 season with the Vancouver Canucks was all about flashes interrupted by bad luck.
Since the Canucks acquired him in January 2025, Chytil has appeared in just 27 games for the club, and this year followed a familiar pattern. He arrived at training camp and the 2025-26 preseason looking sharper and more confident, showing the kind of speed and steady offense that had people thinking he might settle in as the second-line center Vancouver had been waiting for.
He gave that idea a quick jolt right away. Chytil scored two goals in the season opener against the Calgary Flames, then added another against the Dallas Stars a couple games later. For a brief stretch, he looked like he could be a real difference-maker down the middle.
Then the season slipped away from him.
Chytil played in six regular-season games before his luck turned again. After skating in five games, he left Vancouver’s February 2 matchup against the Utah Mammoth with what was described at the time as a tweak.
He later returned to practice during the 2026 Olympic break, but that comeback was cut short when he took an errant puck to the face and suffered facial fractures. He did not play again the rest of the season, though he did get back on the ice at the end of a couple of practices late in the year.
Even with that injury history hanging over him, Chytil still believes he’ll be healthy enough to make a push at training camp in September. That matters for a Canucks center group that could look very different heading into 2026-27. Elias Pettersson, Marco Rossi, Aatu Räty, one of Max Sasson and Paul Cotter, and even Braeden Cootes could all factor into the mix depending on how camp plays out.
As for the grade, the Canucks can only judge what they actually got. Chytil’s best moments were strong enough to show why Vancouver was intrigued in the first place, especially those three goals in six games early on.
But six games is six games, and that kind of availability simply isn’t enough for a team to count on him the way it wants to. Injuries shaped his season more than anything else, but the long list of absences has become part of the evaluation too.
For 2025-26, Chytil gets a C-.
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