If not now, then when?
Here are the facts, simple and unvarnished. The Vancouver Canucks entered this season as a fringe contender, a team widely viewed as having Stanley Cup upside in their realistic range of outcomes.
Only the Dallas Stars and the Edmonton Oilers were assessed as having a higher probability of winning the Cup by The Athletic’s in-house probability model calculated by Dom Luszczyszyn before the season. Vancouver’s “to win Stanley Cup outright” betting odds were identical to those of the Vegas Golden Knights and the Winnipeg Jets. The Canucks were expected to have a real chance of repeating as Pacific Division winners, and entered the year with the second-shortest odds of doing so, behind only the Oilers.
Instead, injuries and absences, internal dysfunction, an evident lack of offensive juice and underperformance from nearly all of Vancouver’s star-level forwards — especially Elias Pettersson — has landed the Canucks in familiar territory: the dreaded mushy middle, where they have mostly resided for the past decade and a half.
Vancouver is still likely to make the playoffs, but it obviously can’t afford too many more performances like the two it put in this weekend in Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. Regardless of whether the Canucks play postseason hockey or not, however, there’s no escaping what should be obvious: This season has been a significant disappointment.
This team has taken a meaningful step back. It has entered a new transitional phase of its team-building cycle, a departure from the plan Jim Rutherford and Patrik Allvin had originally sketched out to better surround the core that Jim Benning built and contend in the short term.
We’re now 10 days out from the NHL trade deadline. While the Canucks have already signalled their intention to continue to prioritize the short term and remain in something close to win-now mode — largely for the sake of continuing to appeal to Quinn Hughes, which is understandable — it’s finally time for this organization to demonstrate an uncharacteristic level of thoughtful patience in determining where its next step forward falls.
There should be no own rentals.
The Canucks must finally go about actually accumulating more talent, as opposed to shuffling it about and playing whack-a-mole with their aggregate talent level — exchanging, for example, enviable centre depth (but a patchwork blue line) for enviable blue-line depth (but patchwork centre depth).
The time has come for the Canucks, as an organization, to look forward. To make moves that raise their ceiling over a multi-year horizon, and not just elevate the floor to enhance their chances of qualifying for the playoffs this year.
Here are four reasons why patience must be the order of the day for a Canucks franchise that has largely refused to exercise it across multiple management groups for over a decade now.
1. Their star-level contributors aren’t sure bets right now
On Sunday, Hughes — the Canucks’ captain and easily their best player — missed his sixth consecutive game.
The Norris-quality blueliner sustained an apparent core injury — reportedly an oblique injury — on the same day Vancouver dealt J.T. Miller to the New York Rangers. The injury has now kept him out of action, and kept him from participating in the 4 Nations Face-Off, for three weeks and counting.
Hughes is the Canucks, and they are lost offensively in his absence. He’s the most impactful defender on the planet, a player who, over the past 24 months, has entered the conversation for one of the five best skaters in the sport outright, regardless of position.
And he’s dealing with multiple significant injuries, including this latest ailment and whatever injury has kept a big, bulky brace on his hand the past six weeks.
In discussing his status with the media last week, Hughes admitted he’d probably be playing at less than 100 percent for the balance of this campaign. Hughes is so good, adaptable and tough that he’ll likely find a way to be extraordinarily effective if he’s in the lineup regardless, but he likely won’t be 100 percent down the stretch or into the playoffs.
Quinn Hughes remains sidelined with an injury that also kept him out of the 4 Nations Face-Off. (Bob Frid / Imagn Images)
And given the way that Hughes is likely to be targeted physically by opponents in the postseason, expecting him to hold up and carry this Canucks team across an additional several months of playoff hockey seems like a asking a lot. Even of a transcendent talent of Hughes’ calibre.
Of course, while Hughes is the most important consideration on this front, he’s not the only one.
Goaltender Thatcher Demko is also working through another extended absence with a lower-body injury, one the club insists isn’t related to the significant knee tear that caused him to miss the playoffs and the first two months of this season.
It’s been a brutally difficult season for Demko from an injury perspective. Between the original lower-body injury, the knee tear, back spasms and this latest lower-body injury, Demko has only managed to finish 18 of his past 21 starts dating back to March of last year.
When Demko is on his game and available, he’s one of the most dominant puck-stoppers in the sport; the sort of goaltender capable of getting hot at the right time and helping an eighth-seed overachieve significantly in the playoffs. Asking him to be that player, however, in April of this year seems like something of a stretch given how his season has unfolded.
Finally, we have to talk about Pettersson. Nobody seems to have a good handle on precisely how injured he is, or what’s behind his significant struggles this season.
We know Pettersson dealt with knee tendinitis down the stretch last season and into the playoffs, and he acknowledged before the season began that it was something he felt he had to train around last summer. The Canucks, however, don’t seem to believe Pettersson prepared hard enough for this season. Whether it’s the lingering effects of recovery or a lack of offseason preparation spiralling into this year, it doesn’t feel likely that a switch is just going to get flipped and we’re suddenly going to see the most imperious, productive and effective version of Pettersson.
Sometimes, unfortunately, it’s just not your year. For a variety of reasons, the Canucks’ best players aren’t at their best and don’t seem like high-probability bets to perform like the game-breakers they can be down the stretch and into the playoffs at the moment.
The Canucks have to look at this and be willing to make a clear-eyed assessment here. Given the circumstances, how can the Canucks justify keeping any expiring players with any value as “own rentals” once you factor in the opportunity cost associated with that decision?
2. The Canucks actually have meaningful prospects coming
The Canucks have remained as committed to accelerating their team-building cycle as ever during the Rutherford and Allvin era, but the current iteration of hockey operations leadership has executed their impatient plan far more effectively than their predecessors. And they’ve shown meaningful discipline in several key areas.
The cap is the most notable example, but the club has also — to its credit — kept at least one eye on the future in accumulating talent in the Rutherford and Allvin era. Since hiring Rutherford, for example, the Canucks have only dealt their own first-round pick once — for Elias Lindholm, who they acquired as the top seed in the Western Conference last January — and have otherwise been relatively protective of ensuring their prospect pipeline keeps flowing. Or starts flowing, in any event.
As a result, they have Jonathan Lekkerimäki lighting it up in the AHL in his first full professional season in North America. Selected in the middle of the first round at the 2021 NHL Draft, Lekkerimäki might not be a great bet to replace Brock Boeser’s impact next season, but he’s trending to be something like Vancouver’s answer to Calgary Flames forward Matt Coronato. An impact top-nine player capable of adding some supporting punch to the offence next season, with upside to grow into a larger role in future seasons.
Boston University standout Tom Willander, meanwhile, hasn’t blown up offensively in his sophomore campaign the way one might’ve hoped, but he has performed very well and is trending to join the Canucks by the end of this season and compete for an NHL job full-time next fall. The No. 11 pick in 2022, Willander’s skill set — his defensive conscientiousness, speed and transitional abilities, in particular — are a perfect match for how the NHL game is evolving.
The Canucks have a few other interesting depth prospects in the system, Victor Mancini impressed in his debut in Utah on Sunday and defender Elias Pettersson has been rock steady for Vancouver in recent weeks. It’s not overwhelming quality or quantity necessarily, but there are helpful pieces in the system; players who can fill meaningful roles down the stretch and into next season in a competitive lineup.
If it won’t be their season this year, the Canucks can at least count on credible reinforcements pushing to make the roster and contribute next season and beyond. It’s been a while since that was true for this club, and if at all possible, the Canucks should be focused on further shoring up and adding to this group between now and the deadline.
That means retaining their own first-round pick and adding whatever future-focused capital is available for those expiring unrestricted free agents who have value on the trade market.
3. Vancouver’s first-round matchup is likely to be a beast
It’s going to be extremely difficult for the Canucks to move up the Western Conference standings at this point.
As it stands, they sit five points back of a Colorado Avalanche team that’s materially more imposing than they are, with two games in hand. They’re likewise four points back of the Los Angeles Kings, one of the best defensive teams in the league, but the Kings also have three games in hand.
The chances of Vancouver catching either team down the stretch and moving up the standings are somewhat remote. Luszczyszyn’s model currently projects Vancouver to finish four points shy of Colorado and nine points shy of Los Angeles.
At the apex of the Western Conference standings sits the imposing Jets, who have run roughshod over all comers throughout the season and punctured the Canucks convincingly with a 6-1 victory in their only meeting of the year so far. That’s Vancouver’s most likely first-round opponent, as it stands.
The Canucks face an uphill climb in the Western Conference standings and could face the first-place Jets in the opening round of the playoffs. (Terrence Lee / Imagn Images)
Even if Vancouver were able to catch Los Angeles or Colorado and avoid Winnipeg, however, it would still be likely to earn a first-round playoff series against Edmonton or Vegas as a reward for its efforts. In five games against the Oilers and the Golden Knights this season, Vancouver has accumulated a 4-1-0 record and has been outscored 21-10.
There’s no need to minimize the fact that qualifying for the postseason matters. It matters for business reasons, it matters because there’s always a chance that this team could get hot and pull off a fun, memorable upset, and it matters because the franchise hasn’t qualified for the playoffs in consecutive years since 2011-12 and during the lockout-abbreviated 2013 season.
In judging what to do before the deadline, however, Canucks management must heavily weigh the very real probability that even if they were to qualify for the playoffs, they’d be heavy underdogs in their first-round series and would likely face a steep climb to even keep the series competitive against their most probable first-round opponents.
4. The Canucks can sell and still make the playoffs
In the wake of this weekend’s disappointment, the standings look compressed and the gap between the Canucks and the chase-pack teams trailing them appears to be narrower than it probably is in reality. In fact, the Flames have popped slightly ahead of the Canucks by point percentage, thanks to their narrow victory over the San Jose Sharks on Sunday evening.
The Flames, however, are about to face a six-game road gauntlet that will see them play five of the most difficult opponents in the league in quick succession.
Calgary is a max-effort side that has punched well above its weight all season, and it would be a tremendous story if it could keep it going. There’s a reason, however, that the Canucks remain heavy favourites to make the playoffs, while the Flames’ odds are valued by sportsbooks in the 2.5-1 range. Upcoming games in Washington, D.C., Tampa Bay, Florida, Carolina and Dallas before the deadline feel make or break if the Flames are going to keep their feel-good, storybook season going.
Utah Hockey Club is a more compelling case, especially given that some of their young players — Logan Cooley and Dylan Guenther, especially — possess the talent to level up suddenly and dominate. Without Hughes on the ice on Sunday night in Utah, both Cooley and Guenther looked better than any individual skater in the Canucks lineup.
Utah also faces the least difficult remaining strength of schedule of any Western team, in part because it has three games remaining against the Chicago Blackhawks.
Utah is dynamic in transition and controls play ably at five-on-five. The team is young and relatively inexperienced but has the sort of profile that can rise suddenly down the stretch of the NHL season. It is still well back of Vancouver in the standings, however, and will have to run very hot down the stretch to outlast the Canucks.
The Canucks don’t have much margin for error, but with how they defend, their competitive baseline is still high. And it would remain high even if they opted to sell a couple of veteran players.
The Canucks, in other words, can chart a patient course forward, sell ahead of the trade deadline, promote some of their young players into bigger roles and still have better than a puncher’s chance to qualify for the playoffs.
They can have their cake and eat it too. There’s no reason to wave the white flag, but the Canucks have to seize this opportunity to do the right thing, and at the very least, recognize their positioning and prioritize using the trade deadline to load up for next season accordingly.
(Top photo of Elias Pettersson and Marcus Pettersson: Derek Cain / Getty Images)
