The Chytil Hole Opens Tomorrow. Vancouver's Depth Problem Isn't Fixed.

The Canucks open in Edmonton on Monday without Filip Chytil, who goes to injured reserve after a shoulder injury suffered in a preseason collision with an official. It's a bad-luck injury on a roster that couldn't afford one. Chytil was expected to contribute at center depth behind Elias Pettersson — exactly the secondary scoring layer this offseason was designed to build. He won't be there.

What fills that gap is the honest question. The depth chart at center runs Pettersson, Linus Karlsson, and Marco Rossi, which is fine on paper and untested at game speed. The broader forward group spent last season generating shots without converting them — Kiefer Sherwood finished with 17 goals but went stretches where the puck simply wouldn't go in, and that pattern held across the lineup. Brendan Gallagher was brought in precisely to address this, but one veteran addition doesn't restructure a depth problem; it patches one spot.

The offseason framing was always that the Canucks had elite talent and needed to build around it. Hughes, Pettersson, Hronek — that core is real. What last season showed, and what Chytil's absence underlines heading into game one, is that the margin for injury at the depth level is essentially zero. There's no buffer. The opener in Edmonton will tell us something about whether that's changed.