Mid-July is usually when NHL free agency starts to thin out, but this year’s market still has a surprising Vancouver flavor to it. According to PuckPedia, 59 players who appeared in NHL games last season are still without contracts, and nearly 20 per cent of them once wore a Canucks sweater.
That group includes 11 former Vancouver players, a list that says a lot about how quickly roster churn can pile up in the league. Some are veterans trying to hang on.
Others are role players whose recent seasons never quite caught traction. A few are still plausible NHL pieces.
Here’s where each one stands.
Evander Kane tops the list, and his 2025-26 season didn’t help his case. He finished with 71 games played, 13 goals, 18 assists and 31 points.
The best part of his Vancouver return may have been the blue and green suit he wore at his first press conference. After that, the production never really matched the hype.
His 0.43 points per game was his lowest mark since he was an 18-year-old rookie in 2009-10.
Carson Soucy also remains unsigned after a season that reinforced what teams already knew about him. The Canucks bet on him in 2023 as a possible top-four defender, but that ceiling never fully showed up.
He handled tougher defensive work well in lighter usage, yet struggled when pushed higher in the lineup. That same pattern followed him in his stops with the New York Rangers and New York Islanders, though he still profiles as a serviceable NHL defenceman.
Tanner Pearson has been bouncing around the league for a while now. In the three seasons since leaving Vancouver, he has already played for four NHL teams.
He went from the Canucks to the Montreal Canadiens before the 2023-24 season, then signed with the Vegas Golden Knights in 2024-25. Last season, he was a regular with the Winnipeg Jets before a trade to the Buffalo Sabres at the deadline.
He never got into their playoff lineup, spending the whole run in the press box.
Ben Hutton is another ex-Canuck still on the market, and his career has taken a very different path from the one he had in Vancouver. He once logged more than 22 minutes a night for the Canucks, which feels like a different era entirely.
Over the last five seasons, he settled in as a sixth or seventh defenceman with Vegas. His 55 games last season were his most since 2021-22, and his six goals were a career high.
Danton Heinen’s Vancouver stint didn’t last, and the fit never really clicked. The Canucks chose him over Vasily Podkolzin, but the experiment ended when he was dealt to the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Marcus Pettersson trade midway through the 2024-25 season.
He also spent time in the AHL for the first time in seven seasons before the Columbus Blue Jackets claimed him on waivers. There, he found a bit more traction in a fourth-line role, putting up five goals and 10 points in 33 games.
Curtis Lazar looked for a moment like he had found some stability after Vancouver traded him in 2023. With the New Jersey Devils in 2023-24, the Salmon Arm, B.C. native set career highs with seven goals and 25 points. But the following season went the other way, and he was again used as a fringe roster player with the Edmonton Oilers last year.
David Kampf is also still unsigned, and his path through the season included a strange stop in Washington. The Canucks sent him to the Capitals at the 2026 trade deadline for a sixth-round pick, even though Washington was already in sell mode after the John Carlson deal.
Kampf played two games for the Capitals and was not re-signed. Vancouver used that pick to select 6-foot-4 Slovak forward Lucian Bernat.
Pierre-Olivier Joseph brought good energy and sharp style to the Canucks last season, but his on-ice value never really matched the rest of the package. He became an unrestricted free agent after Vancouver chose not to give him a qualifying offer, effectively replacing him with Luke Schenn in free agency.
Travis Hamonic is the veteran on this list who feels closest to the end of the road. The 35-year-old spent last season as the Detroit Red Wings’ seventh defenceman, and even in limited minutes he was a liability. He is 74 games short of 1,000 in his NHL career.
Derek Forbort’s season was wrecked almost immediately. He played the first two games of the year and then disappeared from the lineup.
At his end-of-season press conference, he said hip problems began in training camp and snowballed from there. After trying to push through it, he had surgery to repair a labral tear in his hip.
Even so, he still wants to keep going. “I’d like to try and maybe grind out a couple more, depending on how it feels,” Forbort told the media.
“Just talking to the surgeon, he said it’s gonna solve a lot of the issues that I had the last couple of years with it. So hopefully makes a big difference, and can try and continue playing.”
Nils Aman is the final former Canuck on the list, though his departure was always expected. He was a restricted free agent, but the move away from the organization made sense after he led the Abbotsford Canucks in points last season while scoring only six goals in 55 games. He signed with an SHL team earlier this week.
In Other News...
Horvat Trade Questions Are Back As Another Former Piece Gains Buzz
In the middle of Vancouvers reset, the focus has shifted from what the Canucks gave up to which young pieces might actually define the next version of the club. Aatu Raty keeps coming up for the same reason he did when he arrived in the organization: he can win draws, play a responsible center game and, with a little more offensive runway, maybe show there is more to his profile than a support role. His recent international play only added to that case, giving the Canucks another reminder that there is still some untapped value here.
Liam Ohgren and Zeev Buium sit in the same conversation for different reasons, with Ohgrens finishing touch and chemistry-driven upside making him an intriguing forward bet and Buium bringing the kind of skating and puck-moving touch that fits a rebuild built around speed and mobility. For a team trying to establish a new core, those are the kinds of traits that matter most, and the next stretch will go a long way toward showing which of these former assets can become part of the long-term answer. [Read more 🡒]
Canucks Salary Push Could Put More Than Depth At Risk
The Canucks have been operating with a clear financial goal in mind as they reshape the roster, with ownership looking to shave roughly $20 million off last seasons payroll. They have already made a sizable dent through contract drops and veteran departures, and there is still room to keep trimming without getting anywhere near the leagues salary floor.
Jake DeBrusk is one of the more notable names in that conversation, since his contract gives the club a meaningful chunk of money to move if it chooses to keep pressing ahead. Vancouver also has a handful of veterans on expiring deals who could be dealt before the March 5 trade deadline, which makes the next few months less about adding depth and more about deciding how far this reset is going to go. [Read more 🡒]
Canucks Are Taking A Massive Risk Behind Manny Malhotra
The Canucks have built a coaching staff that looks more like a leap of faith than a conventional NHL bench, with Manny Malhotra stepping in as head coach and Ryan Mougenel, Jordan Smith and Jason Krog joining him as assistants. Every one of them is new to NHL coaching at this level, even if they bring plenty of experience from lower leagues, which leaves Vancouver leaning heavily on a group that has not yet had to navigate the day-to-day pressure of an NHL season together.
Malhotra is the lone member of the staff with NHL coaching experience, and that puts a lot of weight on the structure around him. The club does still have some continuity in goaltending coach Marko Torenius and video coach Ian Beckenstein, both of whom have NHL backgrounds, but the bigger question is whether Vancouver is betting on upside, a tighter budget, or both as it tries to build something sustainable behind a first-time head coach. [Read more 🡒]