The Vancouver Canucks’ system has helped hold the fort through the team’s myriad of injuries and absences in the early going.
From Aatu Räty and Arshdeep Bains to Max Sasson and Jonathan Lekkerimäki, the Canucks have had to use some of their young forwards already this season And while the individual performances of some of them have been uneven in fits and starts, they’ve mostly given the club usable minutes.
There’s been a fair bit to be excited about regarding the general trajectory of Vancouver’s prospects. In contrast with their fortunes at the NHL level, there have been relatively few significant injuries in the Canucks prospect pool — Anthony Romani, who’s out indefinitely for OHL North Bay with an upper-body injury, is the key exception — and most prospects have trended well in the first six weeks of their various seasons.
Let’s look at how some of Vancouver’s notable prospects are tracking in the early portion of this campaign. Given the attention we’ve already spent analyzing the players who have been called up, we’ll mostly focus on players who haven’t played NHL games for the Canucks.
Who’s trending up, who’s holding steady and who’s trending down in the Canucks pipeline so far this season?
Trending up
Tom Willander
Willander is off to a very strong start to his sophomore NCAA campaign and has successfully added a more dynamic attacking element to his game.
He thinks the game defence first. That’s part of his appeal as a prospect, and there’s no question about his tools — including his pro-ready frame and special skating ability, which he uses to aggressively kill plays — but, at times in his freshman season, the lack of offensive polish in his toolkit was limiting.
Willander struggled to build chemistry and effectively complement Boston University’s most skilled players as a freshman. When paired with Lane Hutson last season, for example, the fit just didn’t work and BU’s coaching staff ultimately bumped him down the lineup and into more of a shutdown role as a result.
The Canucks were keen to see Willander develop into a more assertive attacking presence on the back end in his second North American professional season, and so far, even as BU’s results have been mixed at the team level, he’s been up to the task as a sophomore.
In BU’s first 12 games this season, Willander has contributed nine points (two goals and seven assists). Impressively, only two of those points have come on the power play.
Willander has demonstrated meaningful growth in his puckhandling polish, which was problematic for him on occasion last season, and willingness to activate and contribute to the build-up in the offensive zone. This aggressive read is an example of a play that Willander made too infrequently last season but has since become a regular part of his game this season:
Tom Willander with the perfect cross-crease feed for his 6th point of the season. #Canucks pic.twitter.com/KtWGsZXKIL
— Dave Hall (@davehall1289) November 3, 2024
Willander will play a major role for Sweden at the upcoming World Junior Championship. He’s unlikely to hold down a first power-play unit role at that tournament given the presence of teammate and fellow 2023 first-rounder Axel Sandin-Pellikka, but he’ll be counted on in a significant role on one of the tournament favourites. If he can have a strong tournament and maintain this level of offensive production at BU, that would be an auspicious sign not just for his NHL potential — given his size, skating ability and defensive instincts, that’s virtually assured — but for his ceiling as a potential top-four mainstay down the line in Vancouver.
Kirill Kudryavtsev
Kudryavtsev has followed up on his strong showing at Canucks training camp and in the preseason with a preposterously impressive and productive first month in the AHL.
In his first year of professional hockey, Kudryavtsev has played a significant role for the Abbotsford Canucks and has pitched in with eight points in 15 games, with only two points on the power play. Kudryavtsev has recently played with Cole McWard, and that duo has formed Abbotsford’s most dynamic puck-moving pair in most games.
That Kudryavtsev arrived in the AHL as a pro-ready player isn’t a tremendous surprise to anyone who watched him closely in preseason. His hockey IQ, mobility and overall slickness are at a very precocious level and it’s translated immediately to the professional ranks. While valid questions remain about Kudryavtsev’s NHL upside, that his production has popped immediately in the AHL with zero ramp-up time is a crucial data point.
Sometimes a player is just good. If Kudryavtsev can maintain a significant role all season in Abbotsford and keep up this level of production, we’ll quickly reach the point where that label applies.
Melvin Fernström
Fernström, a 2024 third-round pick, has demonstrated that he’s too good for the J20 level in Sweden and is beginning to carve out a significant role for Örebro HK in the SHL — the same club team both Lekkerimäki and Elias Pettersson (the defender) played for last season.
Through 16 games at the SHL level, Fernström has mostly logged depth minutes, averaging under 10 minutes per game. Over the past week, however, Fernström has begun to cement himself as a top-nine forward and has expanded his role (and his production) accordingly.
It’s very difficult for a forward in their draft-plus-one campaign to carve out a regular role in the SHL, and it tends to be an auspicious sign for a prospect’s development when they’re able to do so. If a player can handle a regular shift in a difficult professional environment and be productive, things start to get exciting.
So far, Fernström’s production has been solid — three goals and two assists in 16 games is impressive given his age and the league he’s playing in, and only five junior-aged players have scored more goals in the SHL this season — but if he can maintain the sort of deployment he’s been able to earn recently, it could become more than that. In any event, Fernström’s draft-plus-one season is off to a scintillating start. He’s a Canucks prospect to monitor with significant interest.
Sawyer Mynio
Though he’s missed a couple of weeks of action with an upper-body injury, Mynio has been a standout performer on an overmatched WHL Seattle Thunderbirds team this season.
When Mynio was drafted, he was a third-pair penalty-killing specialist on a loaded Thunderbirds team, but Seattle has entered a different stage of its team-building cycle over the past year and a half. Top players like Dylan Guenther and Kevin Korchinski graduated to the NHL, while top prospects like Tij Iginla sought more opportunity on other teams for their draft year. The departures ushered in a larger role for Mynio, who was named co-captain for Seattle last week, and he seized on the increased opportunity, producing significantly on the power play in particular.
Mynio’s production has continued to increase this season, and rather remarkably, he’s managed an even plus-minus rating on the cellar-dwelling Thunderbirds. Plus-minus is a deeply flawed statistic, but it’s notable when a top player is able to come out even on a team that’s been outscored 104-67 through 23 games, as Mynio has.
While Mynio’s production has popped over the past two seasons, there are still some questions about his overall offensive upside. It’s worth noting too that defender scoring is increasingly directed through something of an opportunity funnel. In the past, when four or five defenders on a team received regular power-play ice time, a defender’s offensive production told us a bit more about that player’s skill level. These days, however, there’s usually just one defender who gets to play on the top power play — in Seattle, that’s Mynio — and often their production is a product of that assignment more than a more meaningful reflection of their individual toolkit.
Mynio’s work rate and defensive reliability, more than his offensive potential, have caught the hockey world’s attention. He’s expected to be a strong contender to join Canada’s world juniors roster, and given he’s already signed and widely expected to turn pro after this season, he could be an interesting WHL trade chip to monitor as contenders load up for the playoffs.
Mynio has played exceptional hockey for a losing Seattle team over the past two seasons, but it will be fascinating to see in the months ahead if he gets an opportunity to perform in a winning environment.
Holding
Elias Pettersson
Pettersson has been Abbotsford’s most consistent and most physical defender.
While the AHL Canucks have had a difficult time preventing goals, mostly due to goaltending, Pettersson’s authoritative defensive style has translated well in his first professional season. He’s been Abbotsford’s steadiest shutdown option, which is partly why the NHL Canucks made him an emergency call-up on their most recent homestand.
While Pettersson’s start to the season hasn’t been especially flashy, his defensive and personal maturity is turning heads, and it seems he’s well on track to make his NHL debut at some point this season.
Now in his fourth AHL season, Danila Klimovich has struggled to stay healthy and has yet to break through. (James Snook / USA Today)
Danila Klimovich
We should leave the light on for Klimovich.
The 21-year-old has been in the AHL for parts of four seasons now and has yet to really breakthrough. While we’d usually look at a four-year AHL veteran as a farmhand unlikely to possess the upside necessary to develop into an NHL regular, Klimovich is still young enough that he’s got some runway remaining. And in the early part of this season, he has carved out a larger role than anything he’s previously held down at the AHL level and is currently leading Abbotsford forwards in scoring.
The tools have never been in question for Klimovich — he’s got NHL size, hands and a shot with the mechanical potential to be a lethal weapon — but he’s struggled to stay healthy and earn trust from his coaches. He’s also struggled to control his temper in-game.
So far this season, however, Klimovich has played a more mature, steady game and has done so without sacrificing the occasional “wow” moment he’s capable of creating.
Vilmer Alriksson
A standout at Canucks training camp, Alriksson earned an entry-level contract — and a lot of praise from Rick Tocchet — before he was returned to the OHL. He has since played a significant role and managed a solid 15 points in 17 games for the Guelph Storm.
An imposing 6-foot-6, 235-pound forward, Alriksson has a rare physical profile and some genuine puck skills to go with his remarkable frame. He has performed well in the early going, but he remains a project, and there’s some shift-to-shift (and game-to-game) inconsistency that’s somewhat baked into his learning curve. As a 19-year-old in his draft-plus-two campaign, moreover, you’d ideally want to see his tools translate into production above a point-per-game level. That sort of production tends to be something of a baseline for a player with a shot at developing into more than a role player in the NHL down the line.
Trending down
Nikita Tolopilo
After an impressive first season of North American professional hockey in which he was the more consistent of Abbotsford’s goaltending platoon with Artūrs Šilovs, Tolopilo has struggled through the first month of this season.
Across nine starts in Abbotsford, Tolopilo has permitted 25 goals on just 201 shots for a .879 save percentage. Obviously, that isn’t going to get it done.
Perhaps Tolopilo’s game is already beginning to stabilize. After a run of poor starts in the early part of November, the AHL Canucks gave Tolopilo something of a reset, as he appeared in only two games between Nov. 9-23. Tolopilo was sharp in those two starts, and his return to form punctuated this weekend with a shutout performance against the Henderson Silver Knights — his first career AHL shutout.
Riley Patterson
Patterson has been a solid performer for the OHL’s Barrie Colts, but given the way he thrashed the league in the second half of 2023-24, it’s fair to note he hasn’t quite started off the way he ended last year.
Patterson’s story is an unlikely one to begin with. His rise to being drafted by the Canucks was meteoric. He was passed over in the OHL Priority Draft and then caught absolute fire as a right winger on a line with Seattle Kraken first-rounder Cole Beaudoin down the stretch last season. It was that run of form that cemented him on the NHL radar, where the Canucks ultimately selected him in the fourth round.
This season, while still playing with Beaudoin for the most part, Patterson has managed a respectable 15 points in 20 games. He remains a quick, smart, high-motor player with some complementary offensive upside, but to this point, he hasn’t quite popped to the same level he managed in his draft year.
(Top photo of Tom Willander: Brace Hemmelgarn / USA Today)
