The Vancouver Canucks may not be ready to climb out of the bottom five next season, but age-wise, they’re in a pretty enviable spot.
That’s the broad takeaway from two different roster projections that try to sort NHL teams by average age. Depending on which outlet you trust, Vancouver comes out as either the third-youngest or the sixth-youngest team in the league.
PuckPedia has the Canucks at No. 3, with an average age of 26.8. Only the Montreal Canadiens, at 26.3, and the Chicago Blackhawks, at 26.2, are younger on that list.
A manual count of the players on PuckPedia’s projected roster pushes Vancouver even lower, to 26.26. By that same calculation, both Chicago and Montreal would actually be older than the Canucks.
Elite Prospects, meanwhile, landed on a different answer. Its projected roster had Vancouver sixth in the NHL at 26.61, with Chicago still the youngest team. Elite Prospects even listed retired 35-year-old defenceman Ryan Ellis on the Blackhawks roster, and without him Chicago’s average age drops to 25.2.
However the math shakes out, the Canucks are basically sitting in the same neighborhood they were in last season. They opened the 2025-26 campaign with an average age of 26.8, which made them the fifth-youngest team in the league at the time.
The roster got younger last season when Vancouver moved on from veterans such as Tyler Myers (36), Kiefer Sherwood (30), Conor Garland (30) and Quinn Hughes (26). This offseason, though, the team added a little more age with Jamie Oleksiak (33) and Brendan Gallagher (34).
The biggest differences between the two projected rosters come down to a few key names. PuckPedia includes Braeden Cootes (19) and Victor Mancini (24), while Elite Prospects leaves those two off and instead has Nikita Tolopilo (26) and Ilya Safonov (25).
That makes the opening-night picture especially interesting. Mancini is waiver-exempt, but he looks likely to make the team. Safonov is much harder to pin down.
Cootes is the real question mark. Given where the Canucks are in their rebuild, it doesn’t seem like the cleanest fit to have him start the season in Vancouver unless he clearly earns that spot again.
Under the NHL’s new CBA rules, Vancouver can assign the 19-year-old to Abbotsford next season. That would seem to make a lot of sense for his development, since he’d be playing big minutes in what is arguably the best league outside the NHL.
Tolopilo brings another wrinkle. He is waiver-eligible next season, and while there’s no guarantee another team would claim him, he did statistically outplay both Canucks goaltenders last season. There’s at least an argument that he’s better than a number of NHL backup options.
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