VANCOUVER — The person who will have the greatest impact on the Vancouver Canucks next season is the general manager who has yet to be hired.
The player who will have the greatest impact last played on Jan. 10.
Gone but not forgotten, injured goalie Thatcher Demko remains a massive figure to a National Hockey League franchise plotting a course through a rebuild.
With Quinn Hughes and J.T. Miller traded and what looks increasingly like the permanent diminishment of Elias Pettersson as an impact player, Demko is the last Canuck from the team’s once-glittering core who can still single-handedly win games and materially affect the team’s trajectory.
We’re not for a second suggesting that a healthy Demko makes the Canucks a playoff team next year. But they wouldn’t have finished 32nd this season had he been healthy and maintained the opening-month form that made the 30-year-old arguably the NHL’s best goalie in October.
Yes, the Californian has that kind of gravitational pull on the Canucks.
Except Demko hasn’t been in orbit for most of the last two years as he dealt with a series of knee, groin and back issues related to structural damage in his hip.
Shortly after allowing three goals on six shots in the first period of a 5-0 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs on Jan. 10, Demko was shut down for the season and underwent major hip surgery.
“The last two years I was playing with zero degrees of internal rotation in the hip,” Demko revealed to reporters during Friday’s year-end press conferences. “Everything above and below is going to kind of take the hit — you know, it's the back, it's the knees, it's the groins trying to do too much work. I've already seen incredible strides in kind of my movement, my mobility.”
Demko’s ongoing rehab should see him, he hopes, be back on skates by July and fully ready to play next season.
Literally and figuratively, Demko is a game-changer for the organization. On the ice, as one of the top five goalies in the NHL when healthy, he makes the Canucks a significantly better team.
But if he starts well — and stays healthy — the goalie will also provide another precious trade option to the new general manager, who would have to work with Demko on the no-movement clause negotiated last summer into the three-year, $25.5-million contract extension that starts on Canada Day.
The career Canuck, however, insisted to reporters he wants to be part of the rebuild that was forced (and accelerated) by December’s trade of Hughes to the Minnesota Wild for four assets, including talented early-20s players Zeev Buium, Marco Rossi and Liam Ohgren.
“I've said that I want to be here since the day I got drafted, regardless of what that looks like,” Demko said as the headliner of the first player press conference. “Obviously this year wasn't good enough from our perspective. A lot of things happened. I do think that we have a better team than what we showed this year. I think that we have a lot of really good pieces.
“The last, probably, two weeks you've kind of seen some of the things that I'm talking about being cultivated. . . just the willingness to play for each other and kind of building that camaraderie in the room, and guys sticking up for each other and hanging out outside the rink. You guys don't see a lot of the stuff that goes on off the ice, but there's been significant changes in that front as well, the last couple weeks. Different guys are stepping up in leadership roles. You've seen guys take strides in that area and commit to kind of what the bigger picture looks like moving forward. And we have a lot of young energy in the room, and I think that's really exciting.”
As prickly as Demko can be with reporters in-season, he demonstrated again Friday during his first media availability since January that he is one of the smartest and most thoughtful interviews when he wants to be.
And as with his ability, there is also no doubting his passion.
As we’ve said before, the true measure of a player’s toughness is not how often he gets hurt, but how often he comes back.
With his latest surgery, there is a daunting mass to the rehab and what Demko must do physically to return. But for players who have endured multiple injuries, the greatest challenge is always mental.
“It's brutal, quite frankly,” Demko confirmed. “You have to have a sense of positivity going through all those situations, and keep telling yourself that, you know, 'maybe this time would be different.' You have this hope that you build up, even when you don't feel like it, and just to kind of have that let down every time, time and time again, it's tough.
“I think that this last operation that I had is going to be the answer for all that. So it's kind of like that one last time going through all this, hopefully. I mean, obviously it's a game, and you don't know what the future holds as far as injuries. Anyone can get hurt any night. But just some of the nagging stuff I had hopefully kind of dissipates. We've addressed the larger picture.
“Not playing and kind of going through this, I feel that passion and that fire kind of building every day. And watching to see what these guys have done, leadership-wise and what they've been building the last few weeks and months here, you know, I've never really felt this excited to play here and be a part of building something next year.
“Obviously, you know, I’m probably in the back half of my career here. It's tough when I'm not in the room every day. But, like I said, I'm so proud of how guys have stepped up. It's super inspiring for me to see other guys do it, and it makes you want to... become a better leader, become a better man.”
Demko and his wife, Lexie, moved from San Diego to Michigan a few years ago to be nearer her family. The couple have two children under age three. But the goalie said on Friday that he will be spending the off-season in Vancouver to focus on his rehab and training.
“I mean, this will be a unique summer,” he said. “I still have a ton of work to do (but) I'm excited for that work. I'm excited to kind of build it from the ground up, and get back to where I was that year that we were in the playoffs (2023-24) and the year that I felt like myself. So, yeah, I'm excited to kind of dig in.
“I'm going to be in a great spot in a couple months here. Just kind of that overlying disappointment watching the guys kind of go through what happened this year, and not feel like I could really contribute or help out, I think that when I'm playing the way I can play... I can help (them) kind of get through some rough times. So it was definitely tough. It's been a tough two years; I'm not going to sugarcoat that. But I think just my willingness to kind of get through that and stay committed to these guys up here, and to the city and to the organization, like I said, my fire and my passion has just been growing and growing the last few weeks and few months here.”
Demko will be a powerful wildcard for the Canucks when he returns.
