Frustration level rising as Vancouver Canucks losing skid stretches

VANCOUVER – Manny Malhotra knew this wouldn’t be any easy season. 

Yet his first campaign as head coach of the Vancouver Canucks has brought more frustration than anyone bargained for. 

His team’s 2-1 loss to the Philadelphia Flyers on Monday extended the squad’s skid to six straight outings. 

Vancouver has lost 16 of their last 17 games, and hasn’t won on home ice since Oct. 3.

“We discuss how we knew what we were getting into throughout the course of the season,” Malhotra said after Monday’s defeat. “When mistakes are made — they’re going to happen, we understand that — but when we keep seeing the same mistakes, it’s problematic.”

The mistakes are addressed daily, he added, but they continue to crop up. 

“When you don’t see the proper response to those corrections, the end result is what you saw tonight.”

The Canucks (3-16-1) went into Monday’s contest rested and with a modicum of confidence, having battled hard in a 4-2 loss to the Oilers in Edmonton on Saturday. 

The Flyers (5-10-5) meanwhile were coming off Sunday’s 4-3 overtime loss to the Flames in Calgary and had lost three in a row.

Philadelphia got a jump early with Michael Bunting scoring off a broken rush chance at the 2:03 mark of the first period. Travis Konecny doubled the lead on a man advantage early in the second.

The visitors continued to push, controlling the puck for extended stretches and limiting the Canucks to just six shots across the first two periods.

Dominating a game on the second half of a back-to-back isn’t easy, said Flyers defenceman Travis Sanheim.

“That’s tough to come out with the energy that we did for the first two periods,” he said. “You could tell the guys were eager to get going and wanted to get back on track, and it was a nice effort tonight.”

A third-period power-play tally from Jonathan Lekkerimaki got Vancouver back into the game, but the team couldn’t overcome the deficit and Sanheim sealed the score with an empty-net strike for the Flyers in the final minute. 

Asked where the game turned, Canucks winger Drew O’Connor was blunt.

“I mean, the whole game, I guess,” he said. “Like, we have six shots through two periods. We were just flat. They’re on a back-to-back. They’re a team that’s struggling on a back-to-back, and we just came out flat.”

No one in the Canucks locker room is happy with how they’re playing and no one is happy to see the losses mount, O’Connor added, saying the frustration level is high. 

Continuing to push your game gets increasingly difficult as the losing skid stretches on, he said.

“I think when things aren’t going well, when the puck’s not going in the net, it feels like you’re working 10 times harder,” said the winger. “When things start to go and you’re rewarded for your effort, then it doesn’t feel like that. I think it just feels like an uphill climb a lot of the time, and guys are working hard, guys are battling, and maybe not getting rewarded, whatever it is.

“But I think you really have to dig in and work that much harder to pull yourself out of that kind of, you know, whatever you want to call it.”

The Canucks still have 64 games to go this season. 

The coaching staff need to see change from the group over those games, Malhotra said. How they’ll create that change, though, remains unclear. 

“We’ll have to take a very long look at that and see what our options are in terms of changing the mindset of the group and getting a different result,” the coach said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 9, 2026.