The Vancouver Canucks have alternated permissive defensive efforts (in losses to the St. Louis Blues and Boston Bruins) and lockdown, workmanlike performances (in wins against the Florida Panthers and Colorado Avalanche) over the past week. The peaks and valleys are a real ride at the moment and have only added to our general puzzlement about exactly who and what this year’s team is.
Some nights, the Canucks look like an elite defensive group and a serious contender. On Monday, they outworked the Avalanche from the very first shift, built a lead, removed all oxygen from the contest and didn’t relent until the game was salted away 3-0.
GO DEEPER
Canucks’ Kiefer Sherwood powers an impressive bounce-back win: 3 takeaways
Other nights, they surrender rush scoring chances like they’re individually wrapped candies on Halloween. And most of the time, it’s apparent what sort of game it will be within the first four or five shifts.
On Wednesday night, for the first time in franchise history, the Canucks will face the Utah Hockey Club in Salt Lake City. Utah is young, skilled and scrappy, controls play brilliantly at five-on-five and will be well-rested for a deceptively high-stakes tilt against Vancouver. Then on Thursday night, the Canucks will travel to the Las Vegas Strip for their first meeting of the season with the Pacific Division-leading Vegas Golden Knights.
It would be a very good moment for the real Vancouver Canucks to please stand up.
Let’s open the notebook and unpack some topics surrounding the team, from its listing five-on-five play to the case for extending Pius Suter, to the sustainability of Kiefer Sherwood’s goal scoring and the play of the Vancouver back end.
The case for prioritizing a Suter extension
Overshadowed by Brock Boeser and Kevin Lankinen among the Canucks’ pending unrestricted free agents, versatile do-it-all forward Pius Suter is also running out of term with the Canucks beyond this season. And there’s a case to be made that the club would be wise to prioritize extending the Swiss-born forward.
Vancouver pounced on Suter in mid-August of 2023, signing him to a two-year contract with a $1.6 million cap hit. That deal has been an outrageous bargain, and it’s clear — especially given how Suter has produced and been a mainstay at centre this season — that he won’t be as affordable to retain beyond this season.
In some ways, Suter seems like the classic glue-guy player you love your favourite team to have when he’s making $1.6 million, but perhaps are wary of if he’s making $4 million or so. The truth, however, is that Suter is a credible middle-six centreman at the NHL level with the versatility to play wing and be additive on a top line. He never should’ve been available at the bargain-basement price the Canucks were able to land him for 18 months ago.
While Suter lacks the size (and faceoff-winning ability) teams typically prize in a bottom-six centreman and the flair, panache and power-play production teams look for in top-six centremen, he’s a genuinely special two-way contributor. This season, for example, the Canucks are surrendering scoring chances against at a lower rate with Suter on the ice than they are with any other forward at five-on-five.
Offensively, meanwhile, Suter has been a low-end second-line-rate point producer at five-on-five over the past three seasons but a low-end first-line goal scorer. His goals-per-60 rate at even strength compares favourably to top-end players like Claude Giroux, Elias Pettersson and Dylan Cozens dating back to 2022-23.
Finally, there’s the versatility thing. Suter’s ability to play either wing from the top line to the fourth line, or pitch in effectively at centre from the second line to the fourth line, makes him one of the best floor-raising individual contributors in the NHL. In this, he’s especially unique. Nine of the 12 Canucks skaters with whom he’s spent at least 150 minutes at five-on-five have fared better by shot-attempt differential in minutes in which they’ve shared the ice than in the minutes they haven’t. For the three players who are the exceptions (Conor Garland, Nils Höglander and Ilya Mikheyev), the difference is minimal. His two-way impact on his teammates, meanwhile, is most sharply felt by Vancouver’s most skilled forwards like Pettersson, Boeser and J.T. Miller.
It might seem like Suter is one of those classic depth contributors good teams have to be smart about replacing as opposed to overpaying, but that misses how understated his value is. It misses how crucial he is to the way Vancouver wins games.
Suter is precisely the sort of player all 32 NHL teams should be comfortable handing a middle-class-type contract to with some term involved. He’s going to be more affordable (and just as effective, especially defensively) than any other top-line winger available on the market, more affordable (and just as effective) than any other second-line centreman available on the open market and roughly as affordable (and far more versatile and effective) than the high-end third-liners on the market.
He’s a player the Canucks should prioritize keeping around.
How the blue line is trending
With Filip Hronek out of commission for at least another month, it feels like the Canucks blue line has three distinct tiers of players right now.
There’s Quinn Hughes who’s on a completely different planet than anybody else. Carson Soucy and Tyler Myers are the experienced veterans who would likely be best served playing on a third pair on a contender-level side but are eating heavy top-four minutes right now. Finally, there are interchangeable parts; replacement-level talent the Canucks are counting on to fit in and contribute to a blue-line group that performs at a more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts level that includes Noah Juulsen, Vincent Desharnais and Erik Brännström.
The competition for minutes is wide open because of Hronek’s injury, so who’s trending up and who’s trending down lately?
Soucy is ramping up and re-emerging as a steady defensive hand. The 30-year-old had a poor start to the campaign in which his puck-moving was exposed, his net-front defensive mistakes were uncharacteristically high and his overall underlying metrics were some of the worst in the league. Since Hronek’s injury, Soucy is the only Canucks defenceman (yes, this includes Hughes) who’s driving a five-on-five expected goal share above 50 percent. Vancouver’s outscored opponents 6-2 with him on the ice in this stretch.
These improved defensive results are especially promising because he’s accomplished them despite his usage becoming more difficult. Soucy has logged at least 20 minutes per game in nine straight contests. Before this stretch, he’d never gone more than two games in a row in which he’d played 20 minutes a night as a Canuck, even going back to last season.
Soucy played a career-high 24:16 against Colorado on Monday and thrived defensively despite playing nearly 16 of those minutes head-to-head against Nathan MacKinnon. He’s using his long reach and mobility to aggressively close gaps, break plays up and clear the front of the net. He’s also limiting his mistakes with the puck.
It would be massive if he could maintain his recent form for the rest of the season.
Further down the lineup, Brännström and Desharnais are both struggling. Brännström hasn’t shown the same composure and puck-moving impact he displayed when he first got called up. The Canucks came out flying in the first period against Colorado. That momentum was nearly derailed when Brännström took an unforced delay of game penalty.
The Canucks have controlled just 34 percent of scoring chances during Brännström’s five-on-five shifts since Hronek’s injury, the worst mark among the club’s defencemen. Desharnais’ results haven’t been much better. His puck skills continue to be an issue and he doesn’t bring enough to the penalty kill relative to Juulsen.
Juulsen’s stock, meanwhile, is rising. He’s decisively separated himself from Desharnais and Mark Friedman in the battle for depth RD minutes. Juulsen is averaging over 18 minutes per game over his last five contests. He’s cut down on his turnovers and has looked more confident making plays. In the Colorado game, for example, he made a couple of sharp reads in the offensive zone, including early in the first period when his hard pass to Pettersson led to a quality redirect scoring chance. Most importantly, Juulsen’s offering hard-nosed, positionally sound defensive play at even strength and on the penalty kill. He played over seven minutes against the MacKinnon line at five-on-five, with the Canucks carrying a 5-3 edge in scoring chances in that span.
Juulsen singlehandedly saved a goal in the third period. Mikko Rantanen had sliced his way through the Canucks defence and was wheeling around the net with Thatcher Demko out of position. Juulsen blocked Rantanen’s pass to Artturi Lehkonen who would have had an easy tap-in if the puck had gone through.
Juulsen is also indispensable to the lineup right now because of his penalty killing. He’s logged the second-most PK minutes of all Canucks defenders over the last nine games and has looked excellent doing it by both the eye test and the numbers.
It Sherwood be nice if this were sustainable
With a hat-trick performance against the Avalanche, Sherwood established a new career high for goals scored in a single NHL season — and he did it in just 30 games.
When a player like Sherwood runs this hot — he’s currently on pace for 27 goals and is converting on 18 percent of his shots, well above the 8.8 percent shooting clip he’d managed in his first 187 NHL games coming into this season — that goal-scoring production doesn’t tend to be sustainable. That’s the lifecycle of a bottom-six grinder, and of course, nobody expects Sherwood to flirt with 30 goals this season, so pointing all of this out is something of a truism.
Under the surface, however, there’s a material difference between what Sherwood has done as a goal-scoring threat through 30 games and, for example, what a player like Sam Lafferty — who, ironically, Sherwood was signed to replace in the lineup — did last season. Lafferty, you may recall, scored nine goals through Christmas for the Canucks last season. He went on to score just four more goals over the remaining 55 games he played, including in the 2024 playoffs.
The balance of probability suggests that while Sherwood’s astonishing goal-scoring rate is likely to regress a bit, the balance of Sherwood’s season is likely to follow a different path than Lafferty’s. Even if he runs cold from here until the end of the season, Sherwood is a strong bet to notch 20 goals at a $1.5 million cap hit in his first Canucks season.
The key is that while Sherwood has run purely as a finisher this season, the raw shooting percentage makes his goal totals look more out of whack than they really are. While Sherwood came into the year as a career 8.8 percent finisher, his wrist shot is a legitimate NHL-level weapon and he’s sustained a five-on-five shooting clip well north of 10 percent across his most recent 100 games played.
At five-on-five this season, Sherwood is converting on 17 percent of his shots, and while that will probably fall somewhat over the next 52 games, he’s only running somewhat hotter than he did in his two Nashville Predators seasons where he converted on 10 and 12.5 percent of his five-on-five shots respectively.
There’s also the shot rate and the quality of his opportunity to consider here. Sherwood is currently taking nine shots per hour, which is about a shot-and-a-half upgrade over the rates he generally managed with the Predators. If he’s getting looks at this rate and can sustain that, he will keep scoring goals even if his finishing rate returns to Earth somewhat.
Finally, Sherwood’s usage and role have expanded throughout his first 30 games with the Canucks. He’s regularly played shifts with top-line-rate scorers like Pettersson, or with second-line-rate scorers like Suter over the past four weeks. While Sherwood occasionally flanked skilled players like Luke Evangelista and Tommy Novak in Nashville, he was also often used in a grinder role — often playing tough matchups — while flanking north-south, energy-type players like Cole Smith and Michael McCarron. In other words, at least some of Sherwood’s increased efficiency might be the product of the enhanced quality of his linemates, which is another reason to believe that even if he hits some regression here, it’s not likely to be as steep as it was for Lafferty one year ago.
The five-on-five thing
Give the Canucks credit: It hasn’t always looked pretty, but they have managed a 7-4-2 record over the last few weeks despite key injuries and absences. They’ve benefitted from quality goaltending, huge depth performances from Sherwood and Suter, strong special teams and above-point-per-game contributions from Hughes and Pettersson during this stretch.
Now that the Canucks are starting to get players back — Hronek is the only core player still out of the lineup — you’d like to see the team get back to controlling play more convincingly, too. Vancouver ranks 32nd and 31st respectively for controlling five-on-five shot attempts and scoring chances during that 7-4-2 stretch. All the other teams that had similar underlying numbers in this timeframe (the Rangers, Islanders, Sharks, Canadiens and Blackhawks) had an ugly record, and the trend line for Vancouver’s even-strength game is somewhat concerning.
Courtesy Moneypuck.com
The point of bringing this up isn’t to be critical of the team’s performance — the expectation was simply to hold the fort down over the last few weeks, which they’ve done — but to highlight this as a trend to watch moving forward. You can get away with being decisively outshot and outchanced at even strength for a stretch of games, but long-term, the club’s record will start suffering if the team doesn’t spend more time attacking rather than defending.
Vancouver’s back-to-back games against Utah and Vegas this week won’t be easy, but after that, the schedule presents a perfect opportunity for the team to dial in its even-strength play. Starting Monday, the Canucks will play six games against teams that aren’t in a playoff spot: San Jose, Seattle, Calgary, Seattle, Nashville and Montreal.
That setup could be the perfect launchpad for the Canucks to find a higher, more consistent level so they aren’t as reliant on goaltending as they have been lately.
(Photo of Kiefer Sherwood celebrating with the Canucks bench: Derek Cain / Getty Images)
