The Vancouver Canucks continue to play well and rack up points but have yet to really shift into gear in the first month of the 2024-25 season.
They were confronted with that reality Monday night when they were largely outplayed by the Carolina Hurricanes in an overtime loss. While their early season four-game win streak came to an end, there have been significant bright spots for the Canucks to hang their hat on in the early going — especially the play of their first defence pair and goaltender Kevin Lankinen.
There have also been some facets of Vancouver’s team game, some key engines, that we’ve yet to see fire at full throttle.
Let’s unpack three items from Monday’s game and Tuesday’s practice at Rogers Arena, including the club’s struggles to generate on the power play, Nils Höglander’s apparent demotion and Quinn Hughes’ dominance in the early going.
Attempts to fix the power play
It’s not that the Canucks power play has performed terribly — it has converted on 20 percent of its man-advantage opportunities this season, albeit with the 19th-best goals rate on a per-minute basis — but it hasn’t looked great, and has shot blanks in key moments in some of the most frustrating games.
Monday night was one such game. With the man advantage, the Canucks struggled to set up shop in the Hurricanes’ end. On the most effective and dynamic team-level passing sequence the top power-play unit managed, Vancouver’s top players snapped the puck around ably, working it to Brock Boeser in a prime scoring area.
Boeser, the skater you’d choose to have precisely this sort of opportunity, heeled the one-time attempt.
After the game, Boeser bristled when asked a pointed question about the club’s power-play struggles, but head coach Rick Tocchet was far more critical, insisting there would be changes to their approach. At practice on Tuesday, however, the power-play personnel was unmodified from what was rolled out the evening before.
Whether it’s a personnel issue or an execution issue, Vancouver’s performance with the man advantage is on a short list of the most concerning elements through the first month of the season.
Even if the results have been decent, the underlying process, and the Canucks’ inability to generate looks of any kind with the man advantage, suggests strongly that Vancouver is either going to need to improve its form significantly with an opponent in the penalty box or rely heavily on puck luck. Without one of those two factors working in their favour, the Canucks are going to start to struggle to manufacture goals if their current stagnant power-play form persists.
The Canucks currently rank dead last in power-play shot-attempt rate, according to Natural Stat Trick. The sample is minuscule, of course, but Vancouver is currently managing just 75 shot attempts per hour with the man advantage — the lowest rate in the league by a significant margin. No other team is generating fewer than 83 shot attempts per hour on the power play.
To some extent, high-quality finishing, which we’ve come to expect from this Canucks lineup, has buoyed their overall power-play conversion rate and kept their goals-scored rate at a below-average level. Their anemic shot-attempt rate, however, when combined with the eye tests, hints strongly that the Canucks are struggling to enter the zone and get set up efficiently — which has been an issue for the first power-play unit and a massive issue for the second unit — and is then struggling to convert that limited zone time into quality looks.
Perhaps even more concerning is the Canucks are also surrendering a lot of quality looks against on the man advantage. Only two teams — Utah Hockey Club and the Pittsburgh Penguins — are surrendering scoring chances against to their short-handed opponents at a higher rate than Vancouver. That issue was evident Monday — a Seth Jarvis rush chance that Lankinen sharply turned away was easily the best chance created by either team when Vancouver had the man advantage — but it’s been a repeated issue so far this season.
The Canucks obviously have the skill and shooting talent to produce at a high-end clip on the power play, and to this point in the season, their performance has been fine from a results perspective.
No matter how skilled your finishers are, you have to shoot to score. You’d hope this issue will get sorted as the sample expands and as the coaching staff and players put in the work, diagnose their issues and go about fixing them. This is a team that’s reliably been in and around the top 10 in power-play conversion rate, after all, so we know Vancouver’s first unit has a high baseline level of competence that we should expect them to replicate this season.
The fact is, however, if the Canucks don’t start generating looks at a much higher clip going forward, they’re going to need an awful lot of luck on their side to remain even average with the man advantage.
Höglander’s demotion
On Carolina’s second goal, one lackadaisical backcheck set back some of the impressive work Höglander had put in at training camp, during the preseason and through Vancouver’s first seven games to establish himself as an everyday option in the top six.
Immediately following that unfortunate sequence, Höglander’s line with Elias Pettersson and Conor Garland’s minutes dropped. Through the first 40 minutes, the second line — and the first line through line rushes — was deployed as a fourth line. By the third period, Höglander was dropped off the line entirely and was replaced by Arshdeep Bains. His performance was critiqued sharply by Tocchet after the game.
Höglander’s demotion was cemented on Tuesday afternoon when the club practiced with the same lines they utilized in the third period of Monday’s game. Höglander skated with Pius Suter and Daniel Sprong Tuesday on an ostensible fourth line.
It should be noted Tocchet said he liked how that trio performed together in the third period. And why not? That line took advantage of Pyotr Kochetkov’s overaggressive pokecheck attempt to level the score late in the overtime loss to Carolina. And of course, Vancouver’s forward depth is significant enough that playing on the fourth line isn’t exactly exile, especially given both Suter and Sprong are relatively reliable middle-six-rate scorers.
Still, it’s a measure of just how difficult it can be for a young forward to earn the requisite trust to be deployed at the top of the lineup, and how narrow the margin for error can be in remaining entrenched there.
The climb back up the forward ranks won’t necessarily be straightforward. This is a very deep forward group and the competition is about to get even steeper with Dakota Joshua’s return seemingly imminent. Joshua, who has been a fixture on a line with Garland during Tocchet’s tenure, was deployed in a top-six role throughout the 2024 playoffs and would seem likely to get a look with Pettersson and Garland upon his return.
Still, one poor play in one flat performance should take nothing away from the sizeable strides Höglander has taken as a two-way contributor this season.
Evolving into a top-six forward isn’t necessarily a linear process, and some stops and starts were likely inevitable as Höglander works through that exercise. Sustaining the level of play required to be given that level of responsibility is often one of the final challenges as an NHL player breaks through into a top-six role.
The Canucks very likely require his pace, motor and skill in the top nine at least, and arguably even higher up the lineup than that.
How high is Hughes’ ceiling?
Lost, perhaps, in the Vancouver marketplace’s obsession with Pettersson’s mystifying form and the concern about Thatcher Demko’s timeline and the goal-less streak whack-a-mole is the biggest development of this young Canucks season.
With his brothers in town and a Norris Trophy now in his cabinet at home, we should note it sure seems as if Canucks captain Quinn Hughes has ascended to yet another level of two-way dominance.
It’s a point that should be hammered home in the wake of the Canucks’ loss to the Hurricanes, an Eastern Conference powerhouse that boat-raced every team they faced on a wildly impressive early season West Coast swing over the past week and change. The Hurricanes are the best team in the NHL at controlling play five-on-five; they outshoot and outattempt just about everyone with their unique, relentless brand of “stress hockey.”
And on Monday night against the Canucks, nursing a two-goal lead in the third period, Hughes absolutely wrecked the game.
The slap shot goal Hughes scored might’ve been the punctuation mark on an outrageous individual performance, but it was the way Vancouver carried play with Hughes and his defense partner Filip Hronek on the ice that stuck out. In Hughes’ minutes, Vancouver racked up a massive margin by shot attempts and shots on goal against the Hurricanes, helping to carry its first line — who Tocchet and Adam Foote self-matched as a five-man unit — to a solid all-around evening.
The Canucks have outshot their opponents 108-61 with Hughes on the ice at five-on-five. They’ve scored 10 goals in Hughes’ minutes to only four against.
There are higher-scoring defenders at the moment, and there are defenders who have been more productive quarterbacking the power play, but there is no defender exerting a larger gravitational force on the environment of their teams game on a nightly basis.
Hughes is performing like one of the most impactful skaters in hockey.
As Pettersson finds his game, J.T. Miller appears to be playing at less than 100 percent and Demko remains without a timeline to return, Hughes’ dominance has been central in permitting Vancouver to pick up points in seven of their first eight games to open the season.
What we’re watching every night from Hughes needs to be categorized appropriately and appreciated. This is rare and special stuff.
(Top photo of Quinn Hughes battling for the puck with Carolina’s Eric Robinson: Derek Cain / Getty Images)
