Victor Mancini making the Canucks over Tom Willander feels like a best-case scenario right now

In terms of hype coming into Vancouver Canucks Training Camp 2025, it’s hard to beat Tom Willander. The 20-year-old has had a spot in the lineup penciled in for him essentially ever since he was drafted at 11^th overall back in 2023. A right-shot defender with a high NHL floor, Willander is the rarest of rare prospects, and specifically plays a position that the Canucks had been weak at for more than a decade.

The excitement surrounding his arrival, then, has been perfectly understandable.

And thus far, Willander has performed perfectly well. There have been a few gaps in his game, made apparent through Rookie Camp, Training Camp, and now a trio of exhibition matches. But nothing egregious, and nothing that would truly prevent the Canucks from rostering Willander this year if they were truly dead-set on it.

The only thing standing in the way of Willander making the Canucks to start the 2025-26 season? The fact that another RD prospect has looked better than him out there. That prospect, of course, is Victor Mancini.

Mancini, at age 23 and with 31 NHL games already under his belt, is a decidedly more developed prospect than Willander, and it seems to be showing out there. Previously thought of as more of a ‘safe player,’ Mancini has added a new offensive dynamism to his game since arriving in the Vancouver system. It’s a little bit of a give-and-take there, with some now critiquing Mancini for too much risk-reward in his blueline play. But so far in the preseason, it’s been more reward than risk. Mancini has two goals in two exhibition games, has thrown some huge hits, and has handled the puck like he did down in Abbotsford.

Whereas Willander is playing it safe, Mancini is learning to play the odds.

There’s still plenty of preseason to be played, and we expect this battle to continue down to the wire. But from where we’re sitting right now, it looks like it probably should be Mancini over Willander, at least to start.

And from where we’re sitting, that is probably a good outcome. Maybe even a best-case scenario.

While there would be an undoubted ‘disappointment’ factor for those who expected Willander to come in and be a difference-maker right off the bat, there’s really nothing wrong with him starting out in Abbotsford. Those aforementioned gaps in his current game? They’re less character flaws, and more the exact kind of thing one should expect from a 20-year-old leaping right into professional hockey from the NCAA.

Could Willander work out these issues at the NHL level, as many high-level prospects do? Sure, probably. But there are also plenty of lessons he could be learning at the AHL level in this, his first season of pro hockey. Unlike a major junior prospect, Willander has never even had the chance to join the farm team late in the season and get a taste of the increased game-speed. This is all new to him.

Put a different way, Willander certainly has more to learn and more to prove at the AHL level than does Mancini. It’s true that Mancini only has 37 AHL regular season games under his own belt, which isn’t an enormous amount. But he’s also got 35 AHL playoff games on his resume, and those definitely count for more.

Mancini was probably the Abbotsford Canucks’ top overall defender on route to the 2025 Calder Cup. He has done plenty to earn that next step.

But the real truth of the matter is that, in the long-term, the Canucks are going to need both of these right-shot defenders on their NHL roster. Filip Hronek is locked into place and under contract until 2032. But behind him, it’s just the 35-year-old Tyler Myers, and then it’s Mancini and Willander.

Myers had a good enough year last year, and seems to be aging a bit like a fine wine. But he’s aging all the same, and his game has to fall off at some point. In an ideal world, he’s slowly starting to transition out of the top-four. That’s where minutes should start being available as of this season, and more so as time marches on.

The Canucks have experimented with several LD on the right side already, including Elias Pettersson, Derek Forbort, and P-O Joseph, but all of those feel like temporary measures in case neither of Mancini nor Willander are ready. But in the longer term, it is still one of Mancini or Willander who is destined to take Myers’ spot.

The Canucks have no other RD of note in the system. There’s the currently-injured Jett Woo and a couple of unsigned prospects in Aiden Celebrini and Parker Alcos, and then that’s literally it. Sure, the Canucks could always draft another RD in an upcoming draft, and probably should, but then we’re talking about a significant wait until that player is ready.

The only really feasible succession plan for Myers is Willander or Mancini. Or, ideally, both.

Some are worried about Mancini’s ultimate NHL ceiling. Many have him pigeon-holed as, at best, a really good, really versatile bottom-pairing fixture. Fewer have him as having a little more upward potential, as in a top-four future.

Willander, meanwhile, is said to have true top-pairing potential, even if that potential is a little farther away.  His floor is seen to be somewhere around the top-four.

So, if neither Mancini nor Willander ‘hit’ to their fullest possible extent, the long-term plan would be for Hronek to remain in place, Willander to slide into the top-four soon, and Mancini to take residence of the bottom-pairing as Myers lopes off into retirement.

But if both were to ‘hit,’ that’s suddenly a different story. Then we can talk about Willander displacing Hronek eventually, Mancini moving up into the top-four, and Hronek himself suddenly looking like some mighty fine trade capital to use long before he begins his own age-based decline.

And if that plan is even a possibility, it makes sense to start figuring it out this year. Let Mancini ride his current momentum into the NHL season, and see how far he can take it. Meanwhile, Willander gets his feet and some foundational professional skills under him in Abbotsford, and begins to prepare to take that next step more firmly.

Injuries will hit inevitably, and Willander will get his chance sooner rather than later, in all likelihood.

It would have been truly disappointing had Willander shown up to camp and looked like a player that the Canucks could not possibly roster due to his unreadiness. But that is decidedly not the case. Willander looks ready enough. It’s just that Mancini looks readier, and that’s not a bad thing.

In fact, for the Canucks’ top RD prospect to be beaten out cleanly for a spot by their second-best, slightly older RD prospect can still definitely be construed as a best-case scenario. It’s tough to spin being suddenly flush at the scarcest position in the NHL as anything other than an outright positive.