With the 2025 NHL Draft and the initial free agency frenzy in the books, we now turn to previewing the 2025-26 season for the Vancouver Canucks. Instead of doing report cards, I thought I would change things up and do previews instead. In this ongoing offseason series, I will endeavour to dive into every player in the Canucks organization – even the prospects – and do a recap of last season, what their expectations are going into this season, and finally, predict what their final stat line could look like. In the case of the prospects, I will go a little deeper and talk about their place in the pipeline as well as their future in the NHL and Canucks colours.
Related: Canucks 2025-26 Player Previews: Aatu Raty
In the first of the series, I discussed Aatu Raty. Next up is a frequent linemate of his towards the end of the 2024-25 season, NHL regular-season record holder for hits, Kiefer Sherwood.
Kiefer Sherwood
- How Acquired: Free agent signing on July 1, 2024
- 2024-25 Team: Vancouver Canucks
- 2024-25 Stats: 19 goals and 40 points in 78 games, NHL regular season record 462 hits
- 2025-26 Contract Status: Signed to a two-year deal worth $1.5 million average annual value that ends in 2025-26
2024-25 Season Recap
When Sherwood was signed on the first day of free agency last summer, there wasn’t a lot of fanfare around him. He was a bottom-six player who would provide physicality and score the occasional goal. Not too exciting. He definitely wasn’t expected to be the game-changer he turned out to be. Not only did he hit (a lot), he became one of the Canucks’ top goalscorers, finishing with a career-high 19 goals – four more than Elias Pettersson – and was tied with Conor Garland for fourth on the team. Six of those 19 goals were also game-winners, which led the team. While that could just be an indictment of the roster’s overall lack of punch offensively, it’s still an impressive feat from a guy that was brought in to be a pest, not an offensive dynamo.
Sherwood’s physicality was on display every night, as he easily broke his former teammate Jeremy Lauzon’s 2023-24 record of 386 hits. In fact, he finished with 76 more. There was rarely a game when he finished with fewer than five hits, and he easily led the league in 10-plus hit games; he had 10, including two 12-hit outings. Somehow, he did have one on April 10 against his former club, the Colorado Avalanche, where he was credited with zero,…
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