After a slower-than-ideal start to their season and a disappointing game to kick off their first road trip of 2024-25, the Vancouver Canucks have won two games in a row on the road and have calmed the water in a nervy hockey market.
Vancouver’s decisive victory on Saturday night in Philadelphia was convincing despite the occasional defensive lapse, but on reflection, what really stood out was how poorly the Flyers executed in all phases of the game following a lengthy West Coast road trip and that Vancouver’s depth players performed at a higher level than they’d managed in their previous four contests.
Here are five quick observations on some trends we’re monitoring as the Canucks hold a practice day in Chicago and prepare to close out their road trip with a game against Connor Bedard and the Chicago Blackhawks on Tuesday night.
Boeser’s faceoffs
J.T. Miller appeared to sustain an upper-body injury on the opening faceoff on Saturday night, leaving the playing surface for several minutes.
Miller returned to the game shortly thereafter, missing only a few minutes of action. From that point forward, Miller only took one additional faceoff the rest of the way.
Considering Miller finished Saturday night’s game and given his toughness and long history of durability — Miller has missed just seven games in his Canucks tenure to this point — it’s tough to imagine his short-term availability is in any actual doubt, but we’ll learn more about his status for Tuesday when the club practices on Monday afternoon.
What seems like a more realistic scenario is Miller possibly playing a few games at somewhat less than 100 percent and the Canucks, accordingly, reducing how frequently he takes faceoffs.
It’s not exactly a secret that Miller is Vancouver’s most trusted faceoff winner. Entering Saturday night’s contest, he’d taken 36 more faceoffs than Teddy Blueger, who ranked second among Canucks centremen on faceoffs taken. Of Vancouver’s regular faceoff guys, Miller is the only one with a win rate north of 50 percent who remains on the 23-man roster.
Just thinking through this, there are two possible short-term solutions for the Canucks here. The first is to recall Aatu Räty, who impressively won over 60 percent of draws in his three-game cameo to open the regular season. The second is to lean more heavily on Brock Boeser to win faceoffs, the way they did in Philadelphia.
On Saturday, Boeser won his first three faceoffs and then lost his next four. Canucks head coach Rick Tocchet joked postgame that Boeser’s run of losses after a hot start in the circle was the result of him getting cocky: “He thought he was Patrice Bergeron or something.”
Meanwhile, Boeser noted at least one of his four lost draws after his first three wins was actually a winger win.
“I won one in the third, but their guy jumped through and whacked it back,” Boeser noted. “So I was one off from 50 percent, but I had a lot on my left side.”
Vancouver’s lack of a right-handed draw winner has, at various points this summer, caused Canucks coaches to consider the possibility of tasking Boeser with taking more draws. They hadn’t needed to until Saturday, and in any event, Miller wins draws at a high rate and his go-to faceoff move is designed to work on the weak side. The concept of Boeser taking more draws just hasn’t been something the Canucks have really put into practice.
It may be something we see more of this week and it’s something Boeser would probably be up to. Several years ago, during his first stint with the Canucks, Manny Malhotra suggested to me that Boeser could be an effective faceoff taker given his combination of size, strength and quick hands, even if it hasn’t often been a responsibility he’s taken on in his NHL career to this point.
Brock Boeser takes a faceoff against Philadelphia’s Sean Couturier. (Kyle Ross / Imagn Images)
The thing with running pure
From the dizzying conversion rate to the incredible defensive improvement to the career years from just about every skater who wore the sweater, so much went right for the Canucks last season. It takes nothing away from the level this group hit or the high quality of hockey they played to note that they ran pure throughout 2023-24.
The overall health of the team was another area in which the Canucks enjoyed a fair bit of good fortune. Teams invest a lot of resources into injury prevention and proper training, and both the commitment from the players and their pain tolerance are part of the equation as well. Durability, it’s said, is a skill, after all.
Still, so much can go wrong in a hockey game. And aside from Thatcher Demko’s multiple knee injuries down the stretch and in the playoffs last season, Vancouver’s primary engines were remarkably healthy last season.
The games played really tell the story. Elias Pettersson, Conor Garland and Quinn Hughes all played 82 games. Miller, Filip Hronek and Boeser played 81 games, their one miss coming as an elective team decision in the final, zero-stakes regular-season contest.
So far this season, Vancouver’s best players have remained available, but it hasn’t felt quite as straightforward. Miller was battling through something after training camp that caused him to appear in only one preseason game and may have picked up another nick this weekend. Demko’s injury recovery — he’s still yet to skate with the team, although he continues to travel with the group — certainly hasn’t progressed as quickly as the Canucks hoped it might in the offseason. And while Pettersson has been available, his offseason training had to work around his tendinitis and he certainly hasn’t been shot out of a cannon to open this campaign.
Vancouver has enough quality now to overcome some of these issues in the big picture, but it’s worth being mindful of in calibrating our expectations for this group’s results. It requires an extraordinary level of performance and a lot of things to go right to win 50 games and the division the way the Canucks did last season.
There’s enough talent in this lineup that this year’s version of the Canucks could end up being even better than last season’s team, but even that won’t be enough to necessarily guarantee results as gaudy as what they managed last season.
Brännström, Desharnais and the new-look third pair
Vancouver has been a bit too reliant in the early going on its top pair of Hughes and Hronek, both in terms of the minutes they’ve played — Tocchet noted on Saturday that the club doesn’t ideally want Hughes playing 27-plus minutes per game — and in terms of when and how they control play.
Because the Canucks have trailed somewhat frequently in the first two weeks of the season, however, and because their second and third pairs haven’t controlled play all that effectively in most of their first five games, the coaches haven’t had much choice. They’ve had to ride their top pair.
This made what we saw in Philadelphia on Saturday seem like a welcome departure from most of the Canucks’ other performances this season. On Saturday night, Vancouver’s other defence pairs were able to get out of their own end consistently, generate more zone time and build the sort of lead that will permit the coaches to distribute ice time in a more balanced fashion.
While the Carson Soucy and Tyler Myers pair was sharp on Saturday, the new-look third pair of Erik Brännström and Vincent Desharnais put in a composed performance. Brännström brings a totally different element as a puck-mover on the back end, and not only did that seem to help the Canucks key the rush, but it also seemed to draw out the best performance they have received from Desharnais yet this season.
“They played really well,” Tocchet said on Saturday of his third pair. “Me and Adam Foote talked before the game and said we had to get them out there, to get them some ice time. I thought we got them out there at the right time, they played more than they played the other night and I think they fed off each other. It could be a good pair for us.”
This wasn’t precisely how the organization drew it up, but with Derek Forbort away from the team for personal reasons, Brännström has been given an early opportunity and found a way to run with it through his first two games. It’s early yet and we’ll see if he can sustain this level of reliable performance, but there’s clearly talent there and a need on the back end for a defender with his profile.
Perhaps the key, too, is what playing with a more mobile partner can do to simplify the game for Desharnais, who was at his best for the Edmonton Oilers last season when he played on a pair with a puck-moving defender in Brett Kulak.
“Playing with Branny (in Florida), it was tough a bit,” Desharnais said after the Flyers game. “We hadn’t talked much, he just got here.
“The key the second half of last game and tonight was just talking. We talked so much to make sure we knew where each other was. He made it easy to play with him, we just tried to keep it simple, especially against a team like Philly that forechecks hard. It felt pretty good.
“He’s got mobility, he can move well and he’s got some offence in his game, too. That makes it easy for me. I’m bigger, I can cover more ice, then he just skates by and grabs the puck!”
Almost exactly a year ago, while the Canucks were in Philadelphia for an early season game, they acquired Mark Friedman in a trade with the Pittsburgh Penguins. While Friedman ended up being mostly a depth contributor last season, there was a solid five-week stretch in which he carved out a role on a sturdy depth pair alongside Ian Cole. The contributions of the Cole-Friedman pair were key as the Canucks reeled off an 8-0-1 stretch that jumpstarted their dream 2023-24 campaign.
It doesn’t have to be forever necessarily, but even if the duo of Brännström and Desharnais can get on a short-term run and stabilize what the club is receiving down the lineup, that would be a major development.
Myers’ 1,000th game and ‘The Boys Have Been Talkin’ Tour’
The Canucks wore T-shirts to commemorate Myers’ 1,000th NHL game on Saturday. On the back of the shirts was a list of arenas Myers has called home throughout his NHL career.
It was laid out like a band T-shirt, with the tour destinations listed as part of “The Boys Have Been Talkin’ Tour.”
The Boys Have Been Talkin’ Tour❗️
Team t-shirts to celebrate Myers’ 1000th. pic.twitter.com/ythDO5hQ8e
— Vancouver Canucks (@Canucks) October 19, 2024
The idea stems from an inside joke between Myers and the training staff. It seems that occasionally when Myers provides some feedback or asks for something to be done just a bit differently, he’ll often begin the request by noting “the boys have been talkin’” about whatever it is.
There’s obviously a bit of a roast in this, but also a grain of truth to the idea that a veteran player with weight like Myers, a player who has been through it all — from a Calder-winning rookie to making deep playoff runs with the Winnipeg Jets, to overcoming various injuries — carries a certain weight in an NHL locker room. That he’s the guy most likely to filter what “the boys were talkin’” about into an active suggestion is actually sort of telling and captures some of the off-ice value good, hardworking professionals like Myers can bring to a team.
“He’s seen the ups and downs,” noted Boeser. “Any time a veteran who has played that many games speaks, you listen to a guy like that. Even the coaches listen to a guy like that.”
Lankinen and riding the hot hand
The addition of Kevin Lankinen was a timely one for the Canucks. And it’s provided significant returns in the early going, especially as Artūrs Šilovs has battled through some early season inconsistency in his two season-opening starts.
In his three starts this season, Lankinen has managed a preposterous .970 save percentage at five-on-five. He currently ranks fifth among all NHL goaltenders in goals saved above average, according to Natural Stat Trick. Only Jake Oettinger, Connor Hellebuyck, Filip Gustavsson and Lukas Dostal rank higher by this metric.
Lankinen has performed at a high enough level that the Canucks, having rotated starts between their two netminders through the first four games, broke that rotation and started the veteran for a second consecutive contest on Saturday night in Philadelphia. And Lankinen responded with a shutout performance.
So has the club reached the point where it may roll with the hot hand in net?
“Oh yeah,” Tocchet said after Saturday night’s victory in Philadelphia. “I mean, listen, we have good goaltending here and it’s still early. He’s put three good games together. Even when we were running around a little bit he looked big in his net, he wasn’t flip-flopping, he was just really steady.
“It was a huge acquisition by Patrik (Allvin), to grab him out of nowhere. It’s huge. He played two exhibition games and three games right now and I don’t think he’s had a bad start.”
(Top photo of Vincent Desharnais: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)
