We’re still waiting to see exactly what this version of the Vancouver Canucks is.
Through 17 games, the Canucks haven’t been disappointing overall but they haven’t been especially good either. They sit comfortably in second place in the Pacific Division and will be well-positioned to make a run at defending their division title down the stretch. They are led by one of the five most impactful skaters in the sport in Quinn Hughes. They control play at five-on-five, remain a top defensive side and are generating more scoring chances more consistently than last season.
They’re also, however, a team that currently has a negative goal differential on the season. A team that has struggled mightily on home ice, to the increasing consternation of their paying customers. A side that has mostly floundered when matched up with higher-quality opponents.
The Canucks have weathered some key early-season injuries — including extended absences from Vezina Trophy-calibre netminder Thatcher Demko, 40-goal scoring winger Brock Boeser and key middle-six difference-maker Dakota Joshua — without losing much ground in the Pacific. That alone makes it clear they have a high floor.
If this is a team that also possesses a formidable ceiling, however, we’ve yet to really see it. The notion of this team as a potential contender is, at this point, purely hypothetical.
To reach that level, the Canucks are going to need star centres Elias Pettersson and J.T. Miller, who have battled through some early-season inconsistency, to return to form. They’ll need their power play, which has been better over the past two and a half weeks, to become far more lethal. And they’ll probably need to address a couple of holes in the lineup on the trade market, most obviously on the second pair, although a right-handed faceoff winner would also be a welcome addition.
The entire context around the Canucks feels like something of a holding pattern, which perhaps is adding to the widespread restlessness in the Vancouver market. We’re just waiting to see this team perform up to the high standard it established last season, or not. We’re waiting to see the Canucks get some key contributors healthy and back in the lineup, and for the characteristically aggressive hockey operations department to take stock of their group and begin to make the necessary changes on the trade market.
We’re just waiting, essentially, for this team to really demonstrate who and what it is going to be this season.
As we wait, let’s pass the time by opening up another Canucks notebook.
The Miller benching
Miller was benched by Rick Tocchet for the final 14:40 of Sunday’s 5-3 loss to the Nashville Predators. He played just two third-period shifts and finished 12th among Canucks forwards in ice time.
Miller is a high-usage forward typically, and one of Vancouver’s most dynamic and clutch attacking options. Vancouver’s offence has less venom when Miller sits on the bench, and Tocchet knows that even if he suggested afterward that he “went with the guys I thought could get us back in the game.”
There’s so much to unpack in a coach’s decision to ice a star-level contributor, especially one with Miller’s weight and resonance in the Canucks locker room. Two specific takeaways, however, jump out to us immediately: that accountability is central for this hockey club, and the overall context of Tocchet searching for ways to motivate this group.
Regarding the accountability, this is a central tenant of what the Canucks want to be under Tocchet’s leadership, as well as Jim Rutherford’s and Patrik Allvin’s. You’ll recall how often the words “structure” and “accountability” rang out during the darkest days of this regime’s Canucks tenure, toward the tail end of the Bruce Boudreau era. It wasn’t just a bluff, nor was it a matter of sharing talking points for PR purposes.
Back in those frustrating days of the 2022-23 campaign, Boudreau faced significant internal pressure to bench or scratch star Canucks contributors for freelancing or playing selfishly or making errors in various game situations. There’s a clear willingness from Canucks hockey operations to harm the chances of winning a single game if it helps to create the sort of environment that might better position them to win big down the line.
More than just an organizational point of view, this is one of the major reasons Rutherford and Allvin identified and hired Tocchet in the first place, and were willing to deal with intense scrutiny to land the coach they believed was the right fit.
The second point is a bit more concerning in some ways, but it seems to us the Miller scratch has to be viewed in the context of an eventful five days.
After being handed a serious drubbing by the New York Islanders on home ice on Thursday, Tocchet specifically apologized to the fans. Citing the cost of hockey tickets, Tocchet indirectly called out his team’s performance by focusing on his own, declaring he’d been “outcoached.”
The next day out at UBC, Tocchet held a hard practice ahead of a back-to-back, which is unusual in and of itself. In post-practice commentary to media, Tocchet was again self-critical, declaring he’d been “too soft” this season. While Tocchet has been careful to avoid describing his own group as “soft,” he has criticized his team’s performances as “too light” on a number of occasions this past week. It isn’t difficult to read between the lines.
The Canucks followed up Thursday’s disappointing outing with a deeply uninspired start against Chicago on Saturday. The Blackhawks were all over the Canucks in the first period and took the lead on an Ilya Mikheyev goal that was partly the result of some porous defending from Miller. The Canucks stabilized in the second period somewhat and ultimately scored a regulation win. Tocchet was willing to describe the performance as a “response” and even went so far as to commend his players for the bounce-back, despite their defensive permissiveness through the first 25 minutes.
Finally, on Sunday, with his club trailing, Tocchet benched Miller for most of the third period.
This may have just been another eventful week in Vancouver, but it’s difficult not to see the decision to bench Miller as being connected to Tocchet’s heavily pointed commentary leading into that game. This seems very likely to be an NHL coach looking for the right buttons to push to draw out a harder and more consistent brand of hockey from his group.
If apologizing to the fans and taking personal accountability for the team’s lacklustre home performances wasn’t going to do it, Tocchet was willing to escalate things to try and get his team’s attention. We’ll see if it pays off on Tuesday night when the Canucks host the New York Rangers.
What can the Canucks do (besides a trade) to steady their second pair?
It’s already crystal clear that adding a top-four defenceman needs to be the Canucks’ top priority ahead of the trade deadline. We should expect back-end reinforcements at some point, but what can they change to ice a more serviceable defence in the interim?
It’s a tricky dilemma to tackle, without many obvious solutions.
Many fans are clamouring for Carson Soucy and Tyler Myers to get split up. The eye test tells you it’s been nearly impossible for them to break the puck out of the defensive zone cleanly and that their net-front defending has been shoddy. The numbers are equally ugly: Vancouver is controlling just 37.1 percent of scoring chances and has been outscored 11-4 with that duo on the ice at five-on-five this season.
In short midgame spurts, the coaching staff has experimented with bumping Filip Hronek down to play with Soucy while elevating Myers to play with Hughes. Hronek’s ability to drive his own pair is still a legitimate question mark, though — he and Soucy have been outshot 18-9 and opponents have had a 12-3 advantage in high-danger chances during their five-on-five sample together. It’s a tiny 30-minute sample, so you can’t draw any hard conclusions from it, but we’re not sure that running a Soucy-Hronek, Hughes-Myers top-four configuration is going to yield significantly better results.
Erik Brännström’s promising start has sparked conversation in this market about whether he deserves a more prominent role. Some have even suggested spotting Brännström minutes next to Myers to see if his speed and puck-moving can solidify the second pair, with Soucy bumping down to the third pair.
It sounds like a logical idea in theory: Soucy has been the biggest issue on the second pair and Brännström has excelled on the third pair, so why not swap the two? But it’s highly unlikely the coaching staff view it that simply.
Moving up the lineup by one pairing might not seem like a huge deal, but the jump from Brännström’s current role to what he’d be asked to do if he steps into the top four is a colossal leap in reality.
This season, 194 NHL defencemen have suited up for at least 10 games. Out of those 194 players, there are only 11 defencemen who have been assigned easier matchups than Brännström according to colleague Dom Luszczyszyn’s quality of competition data. Brännström has started a shift in the defensive zone just 10 times all season — only two regular defencemen have had fewer own zone starts.
Soucy and Myers, meanwhile, have been tasked with the hardest matchups of all Canucks defencemen. Yes, harder even than Hughes’ pair. They also take on a massive load of defensive zone starts. This isn’t anything new, they did this all of last season and through the playoffs.
It’s as if Brännström is succeeding in an entry-level job for a company, whereas Soucy has director-level executive responsibilities. Yes, one is performing better than the other right now, but it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison at all.
The point is while a Brännström-Myers pair sounds intriguing in theory, Tocchet probably wouldn’t trust Brännström to absorb typical second-pair responsibilities. This isn’t to say the Canucks should rule out a Brännström-Myers experiment, but it would mean fundamentally reshaping how the Canucks dole out their matchups.
That brings us to one practical idea. Regardless of whether Soucy and Myers are split up or stay together, it’s probably time to ease their workloads.
That doesn’t necessarily mean a significant cut in their ice time, but rather pumping the brakes on how often they’re thrown to the wolves to defend against star players and munch defensive zone starts. Perhaps Hughes needs to temporarily take on tougher head-to-head matchups. Perhaps it’s also time to trust the Brännström-led third pair with a bit more ice time and not spoon-feed them some of the softest matchups in the league.
The cumulative impact of those two tweaks could lessen the second pair’s burden. That won’t totally fix the Soucy-Myers issues, but it seems like a practical option to stem the bleeding.
The fine margins without Demko’s elite goaltending
Vancouver’s netminding hasn’t been a liability, but for as solid as Kevin Lankinen has been, the Canucks are sorely missing Demko. Last year, the Canucks had a sparkling .922 team save percentage at five-on-five over the 82 games that Demko, Casey DeSmith and Arturs Šilovs played, which ranked sixth-best in the NHL.
This season, Lankinen and Šilovs have combined for a .901 save percentage at five-on-five, which ranks bottom 10 in the NHL. Vancouver is the only team with a bottom-10 five-on-five save percentage that is currently sitting in a playoff spot by points percentage.
It’s not that Lankinen or Šilovs are blowing games for the Canucks. Lankinen’s lost three of his four starts, but he wasn’t anywhere close to the main culprit against the Edmonton Oilers or Islanders. However, it’s hard not to look at Sunday’s game against the Predators, for example, as the type of contest Demko would have won for the team last year.
The margins for Vancouver are a lot finer without the luxury of elite goaltending. That makes it harder for the club to navigate a stretch of inconsistent hockey than it normally would be with Demko.
(Top photo of Tyler Myers and Quinn Hughes skating with Predators forward Ryan O’Reilly: Bob Frid / Imagn Images)
