Halloween is supposed to be a little spooky, but for Vancouver Canucks fans, the scariest thing this year hasn’t been a haunted house or a horror movie—it’s been the scoreboard. Fifteen games into the 2026–27 season, the Canucks sit at 3–11–1, a record that would make even a skeleton wince. Their next game falls on Halloween night, when they host the Toronto Maple Leafs, and let’s be honest: no one is sure whether the Leafs should be scared of the Canucks or whether the Canucks are the ones who should be covering their eyes. To make sense of a season that already feels like a haunted carnival ride, The Hockey News decided to play a trick-or-treat game. The rules are simple. Each prompt pairs one trick—a darker, discouraging stat—with one treat, a more positive and hopeful number. Only one of the two statements is true, and the exercise is a way to look at a brutal start without ignoring the small signs of life buried underneath it. The record says this team is one of the worst in the NHL, but records don’t tell the whole story. As the Canucks get ready to play on Halloween, fans are left asking: Is this team a trick or a treat? Is the 3–11–1 start the real story, or are there enough hidden goodies to keep believing? The article sets out to sort through the candy, to separate the chocolate bars from the coal. It finds a team that is offensively competitive but structurally broken, a goaltending situation that has become a horror show, and an organization that can at least look to its AHL affiliate for a few treats. So before the first puck drop against Toronto, here’s a closer look at the numbers, the good and the bad, as told through a series of trick-or-treat moments. It may not tell you whether the Canucks will win tonight, but it will tell you something about who they really are.
First, the treat. Given the Canucks’ terrible record, you might expect them to be near the bottom of every offensive category. But that’s not the case. The team is actually in the top half of the NHL in five-on-five scoring. They have scored 28 goals at even strength this season, which puts them in a tie with the Montreal Canadiens and the Buffalo Sabres for 14th place in the league. That’s not dominant, but it’s respectable. It means that when the Canucks are playing at full strength, they are finding ways to put the puck in the net. Even better, their overall goals-for total is 45, good for 11th in the NHL. For a team with a 3–11–1 record, that’s genuinely surprising. It suggests the offence is not the main problem, or at least not the only problem. The Canucks are generating enough goals to be competitive. They are not being shut down every night, and they are not completely starved for offence. In a season where so much has gone wrong, this is the sweetest treat in the bag. It might not feel like it when the team is losing, but the attack is doing its part. The goals are there. The issue is that they are coming at the wrong times, or they are being cancelled out by goals against. Still, the numbers are the numbers. Vancouver has one of the more productive offences in the league right now, at least when it comes to total goals scored. So if you are looking for a reason to believe that this team can turn things around, start here: the Canucks can score. The trick, of course, is that scoring alone hasn’t led to wins. But the treat is real. On a night when you might expect to find only tricks, this is one stat that tastes like a chocolate bar. It doesn’t fix the losing, but it does prove that the Canucks aren’t as far away from a functional hockey team as their record suggests.
Now for a trick. The Canucks’ PDO rating is currently 1.002. If you’re not familiar with PDO, it’s a fancy hockey term that adds a team’s shooting percentage to its save percentage. It’s often used as a luck indicator. Teams with high PDOs tend to be getting bounces; teams with low PDOs tend to be running into bad luck or poor goaltending. The Canucks’ 1.002 is lower than all four teams mentioned in the prompt: the Montreal Canadiens, Nashville Predators, St. Louis Blues, and New York Rangers. The Rangers lead that group with a 1.014, followed by the Canadiens at 1.008, the Blues at 1.006, and the Predators at 1.005. So the Canucks are below every single one of them. That might not sound like a huge difference, but in hockey, those tiny margins can separate a winning streak from a losing skid. The bigger trick, though, is shot volume. Vancouver’s 316 shots-for ranks 30th in the NHL. Only the Chicago Blackhawks and Columbus Blue Jackets have fewer. This is concerning because the Canucks are scoring goals at a decent rate, but they are not generating a lot of shots, which means they are relying on high shooting percentages to score. That kind of efficiency is hard to sustain over a full season. It’s like getting a lot of candy from one house on Halloween: you enjoy it, but you can’t expect that every house will be as generous. The Canucks need to shoot more. They need to create more chances, spend more time in the offensive zone, and test opposing goaltenders more often. Right now, they are getting by on skill and percentage, and that’s a fragile strategy. The PDO and the shot volume point to a team that is, in some ways, living on borrowed time. They’ve buried some chances, but they haven’t been able to control play enough to generate consistent pressure. That’s a trick, and it’s one of the scarier numbers in the article. It suggests that even the goals they are scoring might dry up if they keep shooting so infrequently. That’s not doom, but it’s a warning.
Now for another treat, and this one comes from Abbotsford. If the NHL club has been a nightmare, the AHL affiliate has been serving up candy by the handful. The prompt asks whether no Abbotsford Canuck has scored five goals to start the season, which would be the trick, or whether three are averaging a point per game, which would be the treat. The answer is the treat. Yes, there are bright spots down on the farm. Ty Mueller has been outstanding, scoring six goals in the team’s first nine games and leading the way with ten points in ten games. Jacob Quillan is right there with him, having scored five goals already. Those two have provided the Abbotsford attack with some real punch. But the production doesn’t stop there. Braeden Cootes, the 2025 first-round pick, is currently out with a lower-body injury, but before he was sidelined, he had three goals and three assists in six games, which works out to a point per game. Defenceman Kirill Kudryavtsev has been even more impressive on a per-game basis, with six assists in five games and the highest points-per-game average on the team at 1.20. For a fan base desperate for hope, these numbers are a reminder that the future isn’t entirely bleak. The Canucks have players in the system who are producing and developing. Mueller and Quillan are earning opportunities. Cootes was a first-round pick for a reason. Kudryavtsev is showing that he can move the puck and drive offence from the blue line. None of this fixes the NHL team’s goaltending or its home record, but it does give the organization some reason to smile. On Halloween, when everything at the NHL level feels like a nightmare, the Abbotsford Canucks are the treat bag you didn’t expect to find. They aren’t going to save the season overnight, but they are proof that the Canucks’ system can develop players who know how to produce. That’s worth holding onto. It might be the only sweet thing in the bag right now, but it’s a real one.
Unfortunately, Halloween also has some very real horror stories, and the Canucks’ goaltending is one of them. The combined save percentage for Vancouver is .859. That is the worst in the NHL, and it is just barely under .860, but “just barely” doesn’t matter when your season is on the line. Kevin Lankinen is currently sitting at .812, a number that is simply not good enough for a team that needs saves to stay in games. Leevi Meriläinen has been better, with a .898 save percentage, but he hasn’t been able to carry the load on his own. Around the league, you can find other goalies struggling, too: Toronto’s Sergei Bobrovsky is at .885, Utah Mammoth’s Karel Vejmelka is at .881, and 2026 Stanley Cup winner Brandon Bussi is at .865. But that doesn’t make Vancouver feel any better. When your goaltending is this shaky, every defensive mistake ends up in the back of the net, and every game becomes a mountain to climb. The trick here is obvious. The Canucks are giving up too many goals, and they aren’t getting the saves they need. There is no way to sugar-coat that. There is also the home record, which is another trick. Through the first 15 games of the season, the 2025–26 Canucks had a better home record than this year’s team, but only slightly. Last year’s team was 2–4–0 in six home games. This year’s team is 1–5–0 in six as well. So the current Canucks have one fewer home win in the same number of tries. It’s not a dramatic difference, but when you are trying to find any sign of progress, it’s a discouraging one. Rogers Arena is supposed to be a fortress, but right now it feels like a haunted house. The goaltending, the home record, the inability to lock down leads—these are the tricks on the doorstep. They are the things that keep fans up at night. They are also the reasons why a 45-goal offence hasn’t been able to produce more than three wins.
So what does it all mean? The Canucks are a team caught between trick and treat. They can score, but they don’t shoot enough. They have a PDO that suggests some bad luck, but they also have a goaltending crisis that no amount of luck can fix. They have promising players in Abbotsford, but the NHL club is struggling to win games at home. The record is bad, but it isn’t the whole story. There are pieces here, and there is even some offence. The problem is that the pieces aren’t fitting together. The goaltending is leaking goals, the shot volume is too low, and the home crowd hasn’t had much to cheer about. On Halloween night, with the Toronto Maple Leafs in town, the Canucks have a chance to give their fans a treat. It won’t fix the season. It won’t make the save percentage magically rise. But it would be a start. It would be a reminder that this team can still compete, that the offence can outscore the problems, and that there is something worth watching in Vancouver. Maybe the real lesson of this trick-or-treat game is that truth is complicated. The Canucks are both a trick and a treat, depending on which stat you look at. They are a team that gives fans reasons to scream and reasons to hope, sometimes in the same period. For those who love this team, that’s the reality. You take the candy corn with the chocolate. You take the bad goaltending with the five-on-five goals. You take the 1–5–0 home record with the point-per-game prospects in Abbotsford. The 2026–27 season hasn’t gone the way anyone wanted, but it isn’t over. And on a night dedicated to ghosts and goblins, maybe the bravest thing a Canucks fan can do is keep watching, keep believing, and see if this team can turn a trick into a treat before the clock strikes midnight. Because if there’s anything Halloween teaches us, it’s that the scariest stories sometimes have the happiest endings.