Filip Chytil left Thursday’s preseason game against the Edmonton Oilers holding his shoulder after a freak collision with referee Riley Brace sent both men crashing hard into the boards. The Canucks forward skated straight to the dressing room and never came back. Head coach Manny Malhotra confirmed afterward that Chytil is being evaluated for a shoulder injury, and with Vancouver’s regular season opener just four days away, the timing could hardly be worse for a player whose career has been defined by bad luck with his body.
Filip Chytil Injury Update: What happened in the Canucks-Oilers collision
The collision looked harmless enough at first. Brace got tangled up with Chytil near the boards during a routine play, and the two went down together in an awkward heap, limbs everywhere. Brace eventually pushed himself up off the ice, slowly but under his own power. Chytil wasn’t as fortunate. He stayed down a beat longer before making his way toward the bench, and it quickly became clear this wasn’t something he could shake off. Shortly after, the Canucks announced he wouldn’t be returning to the game.
Malhotra didn’t have much to offer reporters in the immediate aftermath, and he wasn’t trying to dress that up.
“It’s never good to see a guy leave the game,” Malhotra said. “We’re having his shoulder looked at and we’ll know more (Friday) after the imaging.”
That imaging is happening today, and until the results come back, nobody in Vancouver’s organisation can say with any certainty how serious this actually is. Given Chytil’s history, though, few people around the team are treating it as a minor bump. Preseason collisions rarely make headlines. This one did, instantly, because of who it happened to.
Will Filip Chytil be ready for the Canucks’ season opener?
That’s the question hanging over the entire organisation right now. Vancouver opens its 2026-27 season on September 29 in Edmonton, the earliest start to a regular season in franchise history. A strong result there would be a nice early building block for Malhotra, a first-year NHL head coach already staring down a brutal opening stretch that includes back-to-back dates with Connor McDavid and the Oilers. Losing Chytil for that game, or for longer, would make an already difficult start noticeably harder.
Context matters here, and it isn’t kind. Chytil has played just 27 games total over the past two seasons combined, and he suited up for only 10 during the 2023-24 campaign. He’s battled multiple documented concussions, recurring migraines that have sidelined him mid-season, and a facial fracture after taking a puck to the face in practice last year. He arrived in Vancouver through the January 2025 trade that sent J.T. Miller to the New York Rangers, and injuries have interrupted nearly every stretch of good form he’s found since putting on a Canucks jersey.
None of that means this particular shoulder injury will turn out to be serious. But it explains why a routine-looking bump with a referee has fans and the front office holding their breath rather than shrugging it off and moving on.