2025-2026 Canucks Bold Predictions: Club finishes with four 30-goal scorers again

The round total of 30 goals has become a rough benchmark for goal-scoring success in the modern NHL. Only the very best are truly expected to consistently exceed that number. For the rest, a 30-goal campaign is typically seen as a good one in almost every circumstance, and we’ve seen that expectation play out in recent years for the Vancouver Canucks.

Remember Brock Boeser’s quest for 30 goals that kept coming up short until he finally potted 40 in 2023-24?

Recall the hopes that the newly signed Jake DeBrusk would prove a success by scoring 30 goals in his Vancouver debut season? (He ‘only’ notched 28.)

The unfortunate truth, however, is that neither DeBrusk nor anyone else on the Canucks hit the 30-goal threshold in 2024-25. DeBrusk came closest with 28, followed by Boeser and Pius Suter with 25 each, but nobody else even cracked 20.

Even JT Miller was pacing for fewer than 20 goals at the time of his trade.

It was not exactly a banner year for Canuck goal-scoring, to say the least. And it contrasted sharply with the previous 2023-24 campaign, in which the Canucks enjoyed the contributions of three different 30-goal scorers – Boeser with 40, Miller with 37, and Elias Pettersson with 34.

As we head backward in time, we find that the 2022-23 Canucks, who missed the playoffs despite having four 30-goal scorers: Pettersson (39), Andrei Kuzmenko (39), Miller (32), and Bo Horvat (31).

Go back another year to 2021-22 and the Canucks again had three 30-goal scorers – Miller (32), Pettersson (32), and Horvat (31).

Aside from last year, the next most recent time the Canucks have failed to have a 30-goal scorer was the pandemic-shortened seasons of 2019-20 and 2020-21, though each of those seasons featured players who paced for 30 goals over a full 82-game schedule.

To find the last non-shortened season in which the Canucks did not have a 30-goal scorer – again, until last year – you’ve got to go back to 2018-19. And even then, Pettersson had 28 goals in 71 games and Boeser had 26 in 69, both of which extrapolate to more than 30.

To find the last season before 2024-25 in which no Canuck even paced for 30 goals, you’ve got to go all the way back to the 2016-17 season and the days of Willie Desjardins.

Which is all just a really long-winded way of explaining that 2024-25 wasn’t just a bad goal-scoring year for the Vancouver Canucks, but one of their worst goal-scoring years in recent memory.

This is where we arrive at the Bold Predictions portion of this article.

Bold Prediction

It’s easy enough to predict that someone on the roster will score 30 goals next year. In fact, it’s almost likely. But then that’s not exactly bold, is it?

The Canucks went from three 30-goal scorers in 2023-24 to zero in 2024-25? Could they swing all the way back in 2025-26? Sure, it’s always more challenging to add goal-scorers than drop them, but we can at least call this one within the realm of possibility.

To maximize our boldness, we’re going to instead predict that the Canucks bounce all the way back to their high-water mark of 2022-23, and enjoy the contributions of four different 30-goal scorers in the 2025-26 season.

It doesn’t require quite as much boldness to guess at who these four players might be. Boeser will be eager to prove himself after a down year and a new, long-term contract. He’s perhaps the safest bet to hit 30 goals, so long as he avoids any major injuries.

DeBrusk came close last year, and that was amid about as tumultuous a first season as one can ever expect with a new team. He hit 28 goals with his main running mate, Pettersson, suffering through an awful campaign. If DeBrusk stays healthy and Pettersson bounces back even slightly, 30 goals seems well within reach.

Speaking of Pettersson, he’s easily the biggest part of all this. The three seasons prior to this last one saw him post 32, 39, and 34 goals. In 2024-25, he only notched 15. Pettersson getting back anywhere close to his previous goal-scoring standard would make a massive difference for the Canucks. And chances are if he’s doing that, he’s also rebounded in other aspects of the game, like playmaking – which, in turn, makes it all the more likely that Boeser and DeBrusk hit their marks, too.

If this series were about Fairly Reasonable Predictions, we’d probably leave it there. But the Canucks do have plenty of other candidates available for whom 30 goals might be in reach, and only one of them needs to get there in order for the Canucks to have a quartet.

Conor Garland has a career high of 20, and just keeps getting better every year. He’s developed into a real net-front finisher. But he’s also more of a primary playmaker than a shooter. So a major increase in goals is less than likely at this point, even if it’s still possible.

A better candidate might be the newly arrived Evander Kane. He missed the most recent regular season, but scored 24 goals in 77 games for 2023-24 while dealing with multiple injuries. Before that, Kane paced for 30 goals in four straight seasons (26 goals in 64 games, 22 in 56, 22 in 43, and 16 in 41).

Kane last hit the actual 30-goal mark back in 2018-19 with the San Jose Sharks, so it has been a minute. But if health is finally on his side, he’s about as likely to hit it this year as anyone else on the roster. And it is a contract year for him.

We’d love to throw Kiefer Sherwood out as a candidate here, but expecting a guy to put up a career-high 19 goals at age 30 and then turn around and add another 11 goals the following year sounds a little ridiculous.

And as much natural goal-scoring ability comes with Jonathan Lekkerimäki, he’ll be in tough to stay consistently in the lineup this year, never mind getting enough minutes to approach 30 goals.

No, aside from Boeser, DeBrusk, Pettersson, and Kane, the only other Canuck we think has a real chance of hitting 30 goals is Nils Höglander. And, sure, there may be some ridiculousness in that statement, too, because the guy only got eight goals last year.

But in 2023-24, Höglander hit 24 goals. He did that while primarily playing in the bottom half of the lineup, too.

He’s got a shot at top-six minutes in 2025-26, and given some of the chemistry he flashed with Pettersson last year, one could even argue that Höglander has an inside track. Get him on Pettersson’s wing for the long-term, have Pettersson bounce back, and maybe add some power play minutes to the mix, and suddenly 30 goals might be a distinct possibility for Höglander. Still a long shot, to be sure, but perhaps not as long as some of the others we’ve mentioned.

So, there you have it, a Bold Prediction that the Vancouver Canucks will enjoy the contributions of four different 30-goal scorers in 2025-26. We’re most confident about the Boeser, DeBrusk, and Pettersson side of that prediction; we like Kane’s chances, and we think there’s an outside shot for Höglander, too.

And what a difference it would make for the Canucks’ on-ice fortunes.