VANCOUVER — The person who will have the greatest impact on the Vancouver Canucks next season is the general manager who has yet to be hired.

The player who will have the greatest impact last played on Jan. 10.

Gone but not forgotten, injured goalie Thatcher Demko remains a massive figure to a National Hockey League franchise plotting a course through a rebuild.

With Quinn Hughes and J.T. Miller traded and what looks increasingly like the permanent diminishment of Elias Pettersson as an impact player, Demko is the last Canuck from the team’s once-glittering core who can still single-handedly win games and materially affect the team’s trajectory.

We’re not for a second suggesting that a healthy Demko makes the Canucks a playoff team next year. But they wouldn’t have finished 32nd this season had he been healthy and maintained the opening-month form that made the 30-year-old arguably the NHL’s best goalie in October.

Yes, the Californian has that kind of gravitational pull on the Canucks.

Except Demko hasn’t been in orbit for most of the last two years as he dealt with a series of knee, groin and back issues related to structural damage in his hip.

Shortly after allowing three goals on six shots in the first period of a 5-0 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs on Jan. 10, Demko was shut down for the season and underwent major hip surgery.

“The last two years I was playing with zero degrees of internal rotation in the hip,” Demko revealed to reporters during Friday’s year-end press conferences. “Everything above and below is going to kind of take the hit — you know, it's the back, it's the knees, it's the groins trying to do too much work. I've already seen incredible strides in kind of my movement, my........

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