Cotter Earns Third Star of the Week. Four Games In, He's the Most Encouraging Thing Vancouver Has.

Paul Cotter is four games into the new season and has already been named the NHL's Third Star of the Week, after scoring four goals and adding two assists. That's a small sample, and everyone knows it. But for a team that spent most of last year watching its depth forwards go quiet in exactly the moments they were needed, it's worth noting.

The secondary scoring problem was the defining structural issue of 2025–26. The stars — Pettersson, Hughes, Hronek — produced at an elite rate when healthy, and it still wasn't enough, because almost nobody else could reliably finish. I wrote all preseason about the depth holes, the injury attrition, the thin chart behind the top names. Cotter's start doesn't fix any of that on paper. But it's the kind of early-season signal the organization needed to see from someone outside the top line.

DeBrusk missed time this week with illness, which is a reminder that the injury situation hasn't fully cleared. The depth still has real gaps at center and on the right wing. Six goals and assists from one forward in four games doesn't paper over those structural concerns. What it does is give the coaching staff something to work with — a name to trust in a situation that matters. That's been a short list in Vancouver for a while.