Canucks: Losing sucks! There’s more to come

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If you are big on semantics, you have probably already told your fellow Vancouver Canucks fans that what your favourite team has been living through isn’t a losing streak, rather it’s a winless streak.

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As in, because they picked up points in their first two home games of 2026 — a shootout loss to Seattle and an overtime loss to Boston — it’s not an outright losing streak.

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But as someone who stood in the Canucks’ dressing room after those two games, I can tell you the players just see this awful run to start 2026 as nothing but a losing streak.

And really it’s a run that goes back to that mirage of a four-game winning streak on the road before Christmas, after Quinn Hughes was traded away.

Going into Saturday’s home game against Edmonton, there was just a single win on the Canucks’ record in the previous month, a shootout win in Seattle on Dec. 29. The last win before that was a shootout win in Boston on Dec. 20.

This has been a terrible run of games in a terrible season.

And while the players may continue to try their best, this team seems doomed to keep losing despite all that. This team is surely bound now to be lined up alongside some of the worst outfits in team history.

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Just perusing the Canucks’ list of all-time bad losing streaks we can see some of the worst lineups in team history.

There’s the 10-game losing streak early in the 1997-98 season, which brought the Pat Quinn era to an end. That brought on Mike Keenan and the subsequent ultimate dismantling of the Trevor Linden-led group of players that remains popular to this day nonetheless.

Some pundits have noted that the Canucks’ run going into Saturday, a nine-game winless streak, is set to match that. Technically no, but spiritually, sure.

Either way, the Canucks do have four nine-game losing streaks in their history: twice in 1984-85, if you can believe it, a squad that is probably the weakest in team history. That’s the season which began with Bill LaForge behind the bench, but the bombastic, hard-edged former junior coach was canned after just 20 games, replaced by GM Harry Neale.

That team finished the year with just 59 points. Two out of the next three seasons would see the Canucks finish the year with just 59 points: the third instance, the 1987-88 squad, managed to lose 10 in a row as well. That was Quinn’s first year in charge and the Canucks were never quite so bad again.

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The Canucks also lost nine in a row in 1974-75, but that team actually made the playoffs, the first time the Canucks made the post-season after joining the NHL in 1970.

The Canucks had two eight-game losing streaks in 2016-17, a miserable third year in charge for Willie Desjardins. That’s the year of the sea of Granlunds, a season of Granlunds if you will.

Are we starting to get the picture? When you’re bad, you lose a lot.

No matter what Adam Foote is trying to say, what platitudes his players might be offering, the Canucks keep losing and that’s all we need to know. This team is not good.

Management did think it would be better. They’re now disassembling it — at least they say they are.

How this plays out will tell the story of where this management group legacy is going. Either they’ll be the successful rebuilders, or they’ll be the management group that promised big but failed miserably.

pjohnston@postmedia.com

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