The Vancouver Canucks remain the biggest story in the NHL and not for the right reasons.
While Vancouver’s form has listed, the noise around the club has hit a fever pitch over the past week. At the moment, this Canucks side is the lead item on every national podcast and on Hockey Night in Canada’s Headlines segment on an every-week basis. And it’s for gossipy reasons. The actual state of the team’s play is just riding shotgun in the conversation.
Let’s leave the chatter about star players being dealt and locker room politics aside for the moment. On the ice, the Canucks have looked less like a contender and more like the 20th best team in hockey in the absences of Quinn Hughes and Elias Pettersson. The team’s limitations have been apparent since Christmas, and that’s despite the club battling pretty hard in front of sturdy goaltending on a nightly basis.
Those limitations may be lifted in the near future, however, with some key players primed to return. So let’s open the notebook and unpack some of what we’ve seen from the Canucks of late — and what impact the returning stars might make during a difficult January slate of games.
Quinn Hughes and Elias Pettersson near a return to the lineup
At practice on Sunday in Montreal, Canucks head coach Rick Tocchet upgraded the status of Hughes and Pettersson to day-to-day.
“I would say it’s day-to-day, it’s a possibility tomorrow, but we’ll see what 24 hours. … We want to make the right decision, so we’ll take our time on this,” Tocchet responded when asked by reporters whether Hughes was closer to returning than Pettersson, based on his working with the first power-play unit at practice.
What Hughes’ return would mean for the Canucks lineup is nearly incalculable. In four games without Hughes since the Christmas break concluded, Vancouver has managed to score just seven total goals — despite finishing chances at an above average clip.
While Hughes’ impact is total, this club struggles enormously to generate scoring chances of any meaningful variety whenever he takes a breather. And when he’s out of the lineup entirely, the impact is significant.
Still, even as the Canucks have looked and performed like a team without much offensive juice in Hughes’ absence, they’ve actually been able to maintain a decent enough level of play all things considered. At five-on-five, anyway, they’ve come out with an even goal differential during Hughes’ absence and though a lot of that is the product of high-quality goaltending, they have controlled play decently well during that span.
J.T. Miller’s is among the players regularly generating heavy shifts, if not quality scoring chances. His two-way effectiveness has spiked when the club has needed it. Though the Canucks star has been dogged by trade rumours, national media speculation about his relationship with various teammates and some viral clips in which his effort level appeared uneven, under the hood, his five-on-five contributions have been excellent albeit in somewhat reduced ice time relative to what we’ve come to expect.
Ignoring all the noise, the Canucks have outshot their opponents 29 to 18 in Miller’s minutes since Christmas, and have outscored them as well, helping Vancouver to come out even at five-on-five and pick up three points in four games. It might not be sexy, but it’s the sort of performance that can help make the difference for a team that could yet find themselves in a fight for the final playoff spot in the Western Conference.
Montreal media on Sunday were keen to ask Tocchet about French Canadian defender Vincent Desharnais, and how he’s responded to being included in a variety of trade rumours early in his Canucks tenure.
Obviously the concerns with the Canucks defence corps, and the lack of overall puck moving and mobility on the back-end, have been a permanent feature of conversations around the team all season. Desharnais is an excellent penalty killer and a brutish, physical defender who has performed well in fits and spurts this season, but overall, the fit hasn’t been ideal. What he does well is somewhat redundant given the composition of this blue-line group, and the areas he has struggled can mirror the shortcomings of the group as a whole, exacerbating the team’s puck-moving issues.
While the “does Desharnais fit?” question has soaked up a lot of focus, the same level of inquiry has rarely been applied to forward Danton Heinen, who similarly signed a multi-year contract for north of $2 million in the summer, and whose fit in this lineup has similarly shown evident seams.
Heinen opened training camp in Vancouver’s top-six, but has seen his role and ice time drop — with the exception of a stretch in mid-November when Brock Boeser was out of the lineup with injury — consistently over the course of the season. Of late, the club has gone with Phil Di Giuseppe on a line with Miller and Boeser in the top-six, and that line has performed exceptionally well. Credit Di Giuseppe, but isn’t that precisely the sort of role that Heinen was brought in to fill?
While Heinen’s offensive production has been steady enough for a middle-six contributor, his two-way impact hasn’t quite met expectations.
When we’re looking to explain why this Canucks season has felt so different from last, we have to start with the preponderance of injuries to star-level performers. Then we should move on to the struggles of Pettersson and Miller, relative to the levels they hit for large swaths of the 2023-24 campaign.
After that, however, it’s probably worth noting that the Canucks knocked it out of the park on just about every value free agent they brought in last year (Pius Suter, Teddy Blueger, Ian Cole, Carson Soucy, Sam Lafferty), which stands in contrast with what we’ve seen this season. The work has still been solid to really solid overall: Kevin Lankinen has been nothing short of essential, while Kiefer Sherwood and Jake DeBrusk have been excellent additions. Heinen and Desharnais, however, have struggled somewhat, and Derek Forbort’s impact has been limited by a lack of availability (he’s only appeared in 12 games).
Whereas the Canucks front office hit in the 99th percentile of evaluative efficiency in free agency in the summer of 2023, this past summer, their work was perhaps closer to good or above average. And for an organization that’s taken significant strides, but is still lacking in high-quality depth, that’s a major part of what’s made the sledding more difficult.
The January gantlet
On Monday night the Canucks will face the Montreal Canadiens at Le Centre Bell. They won’t play another opponent outside of the top-10 in the NHL by point percentage until Jan. 21.
On the other side of this Habs game, the Canucks face a gantlet. Measuring-stick games against the Washington Capitals (twice), the Winnipeg Jets, the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Edmonton Oilers (twice), the Carolina Hurricanes and the Los Angeles Kings loom on the immediate horizon.
These are big games, and this is a crucial stretch for a team that has spent much of the margin for error created by a solid start over the course of the past month. Vancouver will enter their game against the Canadiens on Monday, for example, rather clearly in the mix for the final Wild Card playoff berth with Utah and Calgary, as opposed to being in close contact with Los Angeles and Edmonton for a top-three spot in the Pacific Division.
The difficulty of Vancouver’s schedule amps up the stakes of thee game in Montreal, but les Habitants are not a side to take lightly at the moment. The Canadiens come into Monday night’s game having won seven of their past nine, with signature wins over contender-calibre teams in Tampa Bay, Florida, Colorado and the Vegas Golden Knights.
Young, hot shot goaltender Jakub Dobeš is stealing the bulk of recent headlines in Montreal, but the Canadiens’ power play has been dangerous with Patrik Laine finding his touch. There’s a ton of shooting talent up and down Montreal’s lineup and the club appears to have found a meaningfully higher five-on-five gear since acquiring Alexandre Carrier and playing him on a shutdown pair with Kaiden Guhle.
The Canadiens are a far more dangerous opponent today than they were five weeks ago, which adds to the apparent difficulty of the stretch Vancouver is facing over the balance of this month.
(Top photo of Quinn Hughes: Charles LeClaire / Imagn Images)
