VANCOUVER — The Vancouver Canucks weren’t missing six players on Monday when they lost to the Winnipeg Jets. They were missing 12: their six injured guys, plus the six they don’t yet have on their roster in order to compete against the best teams in the National Hockey League.

The Jets, a Stanley Cup favourite who are Exhibit A among the draft-and-development route’s finished products, showed that the Canucks are on the right path, but also how much heavy lifting — and patience — is still required in Vancouver.

Ask around the league about the Canucks’ excellent young players and everyone mentions Elias Pettersson, Bo Horvat and Brock Boeser, who is among the injured and did not travel Tuesday for the struggling team’s three-game California road trip that starts Wednesday against the Anaheim Ducks.

Optimists paying attention to the Canucks this season might also mention young wingers Nikolay Goldobin and Sven Baertschi.

But look at the Jets’ roster and it’s not four or five superior forwards they have, but eight or nine. Of the six defencemen the Canucks dressed in their 6-3 loss, it’s possible only Chris Tanev would be good enough right now to dislodge anyone from the Jets’ blue line. And in goal, Canuck Jacob Markstrom isn’t at the Jets’ Connor Hellebuyck’s level.

Quinn Hughes, when he graduates to the Canucks from the University of Michigan next spring or fall, could quickly become Vancouver’s top defenceman. The organization also has Olli Juolevi in the American League and Jet Woo in junior. There are also another handful of forwards with the Utica Comets — Jonathan Dahlen, Kole Lind, Jonah Gadjovich, Zack MacEwen — who could become Canucks regulars.

Despite his poor pre-season and a concussion that has kept him from playing until this week, Thatcher Demko is still the Canucks’ goalie-of-the-future.

But best-case scenario, the Canucks are probably at least another season away from being more than a playoff long-shot, and three or four years from being good enough to challenge for a championship. Minimum.

For now, they’re on a six-game losing streak (0-5-1) that has seen them fall to 30th in the NHL in goals-against (3.57 per game). Their injuries and their road-heavy schedule have caught up to them, and they’re just trying to survive until healthy bodies start returning to the lineup.

Top defenceman Alex Edler (sprained knee) and backup goalie Anders Nilsson (broken finger) are on the California trip.

“Even last night in the third period, we had chances to tie that game up, and Winnipeg is one of the best teams in the league,” general manager Jim Benning told Sportsnet after the Canucks cancelled their Tuesday practice. “We’ve been competitive. But we want to win games, too. We’re disappointed we’re in this losing streak, but our guys are working hard every night and we’ve been competitive.

“Our objective when we started the year is we wanted to be competitive in the games and we wanted our young players to be playing and developing. Hopefully here, this next week or 10 days, we start getting some guys back.”

The Canucks can’t really control their injuries. But they have input on their schedule, which looks even worse now than when it came out last summer.

No NHL team has ever reacted to the NHL’s schedule release with: ‘We love it. We can’t wait for those four games in six nights over three time zones in February.’ Everybody is unhappy.

But even with three road games in four nights looming, Vancouver already leads the NHL with 14 road games. They’ve endured two — two! — six-game road trips, which were followed by homestands too brief to provide any benefit except clean laundry.

When the Canucks face the Ducks on Wednesday, they’ll have travelled before 17 of their 23 games this season. That’s absurd.

“We tried to push back on a few things, but this is just the way the schedule is,” Benning said. “What happened is Edmonton was going over to Europe (to start the season), and the league wasn’t going to bring teams out here just to play us and Calgary, then make them come back another time to play Edmonton. There’s only so much you can do. You give them the dates to your rink and they have a tough job to create the schedule.

“The problem is it seems when you play as many road games as we’ve played so far, with the travel and stuff, sometimes injuries come with it. (But) everybody has injuries, everybody has a tough schedule. We just have to figure out a way to be better.”

The Jets, who have played half the road games the Canucks have, and have one injury: depth defenceman Dmitry Kulikov. As of Tuesday morning, the Calgary Flames had played 10 road games, the Edmonton Oilers 11.

The most troubling Canucks injury is to Boeser, who has made little progress since being sent home from the last trip to rest his sore groin. The absence of last season’s Calder Trophy finalist nearly mirrors the Canucks’ six-game nosedive.

“If he’s playing these last six games, we probably have more wins,” Benning said. “With every injury, there’s concern. We want to do the right thing for Brock long-term, so we’re going to wait until he’s 100 per cent. Do we miss him? Yeah, we miss him a lot. In that game last night, you saw the way (Winnipeg’s Patrik) Laine shoots the puck. Brock does that for us.”

Benning is encouraged that the Canucks and their young forwards appear to be the development stage the Jets were about three years ago.

“To see the young players we have in the lineup now, and some of these young guys we have developing in Utica and our draft picks, we’re on that same path (as the Jets),” he said. “Like I’ve said all along, we just have to be patient. That’s ultimately where we want to get to — where we’re one of the best teams every night.”