The Vancouver Canucks were never going to enter into a rebuilding phase of their team-building cycle intentionally.

Make no mistake, however, the rebuild has arrived.

This isn’t up for debate. It’s not a matter of organizational planning. It doesn’t matter what Vancouver’s stubborn ownership group prefers. It can’t be wished away by too cute semantic branding.

It’s simply a matter of fact. And a matter of talent, or more accurately, a critical lack thereof.

The Canucks have fallen out of what we’ve long described (and derided) as the “mushy middle.” They now belong as a bottom-end team in the NHL pecking order.

That’s their big-picture reality today, locked in since the club jettisoned Quinn Hughes proactively earlier this month.

It’s their probable big-picture reality in the short- to medium-term as well. The Canucks lack average draft capital, aren’t especially desirable as a destination for free agents and their prospect pipeline is widely rated as being well below average. The overwhelming likelihood is that while the club would prefer to truncate this rebuilding effort, there’s no realistic escape for Vancouver, at this point, without some measure of pain over a multiyear horizon.

Where the Canucks find themselves in the standings, and barring a Winnipeg Jets regulation loss on Wednesday afternoon, Vancouver will close out the 2025 portion of this season locked into last place, isn’t set in stone. Their perch in the standings is superficial.

In a sport as variable as hockey, in a league as unpredictable as the NHL, the Canucks will win some games over the balance of this season and even put together the odd winning streak. This team is by no means guaranteed to finish 32nd in the NHL standings, as valuable as that would be to the franchise given the shape of the 2026 NHL Draft class.

In all of the places that matter, however, the Canucks are overmatched nearly every game. This group of players can compete their guts out and legitimately did in splitting a back-to-back set against the Seattle Kraken and the Philadelphia Flyers this week, and it won’t alter the logic of where the Canucks have arrived organizationally.

Vancouver is now one of the league’s worst teams on a true talent basis. The Canucks will close the 2025 calendar year having amassed a 37-39-6 record, good for the 27th spot in the NHL by point percentage over the past 12 months.

With the high-profile trades of Hughes and, to a much lesser extent, J.T. Miller, the Canucks have now fallen into a vortex of ineptitude that exists beneath that baseline level of competitive mid-ness in which variance rules and a team can make the playoffs if everything goes right.

When you start to spin about this vortex, as we witnessed in Vancouver 10 years ago, an organization can try to take every shortcut available — win-now trades, age-gap trades, big free-agent signings — without making a dent. To slingshot back up the standings, it usually takes an organization adding multiple high-end contributors.

For all of the debate in the market about rebuilding and the confusion about what the organization means by retooling in a hybrid state, this is where the Canucks have landed. The rebuild is now inevitable because the losing is now inevitable.

The organization can fight against it, struggle against it and deny it all they like. At some point, however, rebuilding has its own gravity.

When the losses pile up, and the scale of the mess becomes undeniable, even the dimmest NHL organization will eventually get serious about what it’ll take to change, at least for a little bit.

What it will take to change things in Vancouver is a significant reorientation of priorities. And that begins with recognition.

This is a team, after all, that on Tuesday night deployed Toronto Maple Leafs castoff defensive centre David Kämpf — who has 35 points across his previous 155 NHL games — in a six-on-five situation.

A team that needed defenceman Filip Hronek to log 55 all-situations minutes over back-to-back games to earn an unconvincing split against a pair of non-contending teams.

A team whose leading scorer for the season — Elias Pettersson, who has 23 points — has fewer points than Connor McDavid (33), Leon Draisaitl (25), Macklin Celebrini (23, with one game remaining) and Nathan MacKinnon (22, with one game remaining) are likely to register in December alone.

A team that scratched a pair of younger players, in 25-year-old Nils Höglander (although he’s still working his way back from a long-term injury, and in fairness, was held out of the second leg of the back-to-back set for load management purposes) and 23-year-old Aatu Räty, in part because of an unworkable logjam of forward depth that the club should prioritize monetizing on the trade market in short order.

There’s a level of naked unseriousness in all of this, which needs to be grappled with and dealt with sensibly.

The biggest aspect of that is for the club to begin to really consider how much work it’s likely to take to prop up this lineup to the point of contention, and how unlikely it is that the vast majority of Vancouver’s useful veterans in their late 20s will still be in their primes by the time that turnaround is accomplished.

Twelve months from now, as we’re counting down to the end of 2026, the Canucks should be in a brighter spot.

The lineup should be even worse and less experienced when we arrive at the precipice of 2027, if the club is doing it right.

Worse, but with a clearer developmental direction and a more obvious path forward, would be a significant improvement over where the Canucks find themselves at the end of 2025.

When we look back at 2025, we’ll remember the Miller drama and the subsequent trade. We’ll recall that Rick Tocchet’s departure was a troubling indicator, an insider selling his company shares. And we’ll remember the Hughes trade, which signalled both the end of an era and the inarguable failure of the fitful, impatient and deeply bungled Jim Benning era rebuild.

If the Canucks, however, can come to terms with what they are and how they’ve arrived here, and can begin to behave and plan accordingly, then perhaps we’ll remember 2025 somewhat differently.

Perhaps we’ll remember it instead as the year Vancouver acquired Zeev Buium, drafted Braeden Cootes and began to take some of the necessary steps that the club has long required to accumulate the sort of critical mass of high-end NHL players that any ambitious team needs to assemble to have a credible shot at winning the Stanley Cup.

2025 was the year the bottom fell out on the Canucks; let’s hope that 2026 is the year the organization finally gets serious.