In the grand scheme of a full NHL regular season, two games is a blip.
Most often when we’re talking about a two-game stretch, we’re talking about half a week’s worth of hockey games — not enough for a streak either way.
When those two games occur at the very outset of the season, however, they accrue undue weight. First impressions are nothing if not influential.
If a team wins its first two games, as the Vancouver Canucks did last season, a lot of fans will permit themselves to dream about a magical season — even if, deep down, they know better.
If a team drops its first two games, as the Canucks have done this season, a lot of fans will permit themselves to indulge in the natural fatalism and anxiousness that so often defines the experience for long-suffering fan bases — even if, deep down, they know better.
From an analytical perspective, two results carry negligible weight. All additional data is welcome, but we’re talking about a drop in the bucket on our way to something approaching a meaningful sample.
In that context, that the Canucks entered this season with aspirations of meaningful contention but have failed to secure a win through their first two games (though they’ve also yet to be defeated in regulation) is of little consequence.
For the most part, the Canucks have shown flashes of excellent form, but have been a bit inconsistent and sloppy in execution.
Their forward group looks deep, fast and occasionally dynamic, but also like a group with a ton of new pieces that is still building on-ice rapport.
The Canucks’ blue-line group has looked a bit immobile beyond the first pair, but that was a baked-in assumption going into this season.
Vancouver’s goaltending was poor in one game and solid in the other, but regardless of whether it’s Artūrs Šilovs or Kevin Lankinen in net, Canucks puck-stopping lacks the aura it has when Thatcher Demko is in net.
Bits and pieces of those early season storylines may influence the course of this season. Much of it could also turn out to be noise; a two-game mirage and nothing more.
Even then these are issues at the margins, ultimately. Even if the goaltending isn’t going to be as good without Demko, or if Vancouver’s second and third pairs are going to struggle somewhat to key the rush, or if some of Vancouver’s free-agent acquisitions up front aren’t going to work out, it probably isn’t going to be determinative.
Certainly, it won’t matter as much as whether Vancouver’s star players are on their game. This is one of the main things Vancouver hasn’t had in its first two games of the season: Its best players have yet to play to the level at which their performance is the singular reason for a win.
One suspects this is why the subject of Elias Pettersson is such an obsessive one for some Canucks fans. Pettersson has been a superstar-level performer for most of his career, but he’s lacked some juice for about 40 games now — between the stretch run, the 2024 playoffs and the first two games of this season. January 2024, the month in which Pettersson was named the NHL’s first star, feels like a long time ago.
That Vancouver’s star players have yet to dominate should be the primary reason to write off losses in its first two games as noise.
We should be pretty confident about what Pettersson and the likes of J.T. Miller, Quinn Hughes and Brock Boeser can do, and how good they can be.
If Pettersson made one shot against the Philadelphia Flyers on Friday night, off of a turnover he cleverly created in the closing minute of regulation, that confidence would’ve returned in full. The Canucks would have a win in the books, and the excitement in this market would be through the roof.
Instead, Pettersson missed his shot just wide. Fine margins.
So instead the conversation remains critically focused on Pettersson, while the confidence Canucks fans should have in a core group that showed us they’re good enough to power this team to the top of the Pacific Division standings last season isn’t quite at the level it probably should be.
It was a good sign for defender Tyler Myers, who left the game on Friday with an apparent knee injury that looked severe in real time, that the Canucks declined to recall a depth defender before travelling down to Florida. That strongly suggests Myers’ injury isn’t likely to be long-term.
Canucks head coach Rick Tocchet confirmed as much following the club’s practice in the Tampa Bay area on Monday, which, notably, Myers was able to attend as a full participant.
“He actually felt pretty good, there’s still a little bit of stuff there but we’re very fortunate,” Tocchet told reporters. “We dodged a bullet.”
Reading between the lines of that Tocchet quote, it would seem to suggest Myers is questionable at best for the game against the Tampa Bay Lightning on Tuesday night but has ducked a lengthier potential absence. That has to be a significant sigh of relief for a club that, like most other NHL teams, isn’t well positioned to stomach a prolonged absence from either of its top-four right-handed blueliners.
Arshdeep Bains’ opportunity?
Sportsnet’s Dan Murphy suggested on Monday that Tocchet had significantly reimagined his forward lines at practice, manufacturing a new fourth line while rotating wingers through the top six.
Based on this alignment, only Vancouver’s third line, which has been its best by some margin, appeared to be unchanged:
My best guess:
Boeser-Miller-Baines
Heinen-EP-Debrusk
Hoglander-Raty-Garland
Sherwood-Blueger-Suter
SprongDefence all been rotating
— Dan Murphy (@sportsnetmurph) October 14, 2024
The headline alteration to the Canucks lineup, of course, is the significant opportunity that may await undrafted free-agent winger and Abbotsford Canucks standout Arshdeep Bains on Tuesday night in Northwest Florida.
If Bains, 23, is actually tasked with playing on a line with Boeser and Miller on Tuesday night, it’ll be a higher-stakes audition than the extended eight-game look the Canucks gave Bains down the stretch of the 2023-24 campaign.
In that eight-game cup of coffee, Bains played most frequently with middle-six players like Teddy Blueger, Conor Garland and Elias Lindholm, although he did get a brief look with Boeser and Miller and the results were decidedly mixed.
What stood out about Bains’ first eight NHL games were the coaches’ pet-level details: his defensive work rate, his stops and starts and his play along the wall.
Those standout attributes were something of a double-edged sword, however, in my view. No matter how much the commendable hustle showed through for Bains, where his performance was lacking down the stretch last season at the NHL level, was in how little Vancouver was able to generate with him on the ice in five-on-five situations. And that appeared to be tied to his unwillingness to take chances or make the sort of creative, connective plays that have been his bread and butter, both as a top WHL scorer and as an AHL All-Star.
Simply put, the Bains we saw seemed to be attempting to play a totally different game. It was as if he was so concerned with being a diligent checker that he wasn’t himself on the ice. It seemed as if one of Bains’ primary issues adjusting to the NHL game was getting comfortable with the idea of playing his game.
With that in mind, it’s easy to like the idea of the Canucks throwing Bains into the fire with a top-line opportunity for his season debut. Bains, after all, isn’t really a classic energy-line type player even if he has the motor for it. This is a player with playmaking ability to burn, a player whose on-ice vision and intelligence will be his separating skills if he makes it as a full-time NHL professional.
Perhaps putting Bains with skilled players and tasking him to play with first-line aggression can help him unlock his game at the NHL level. It seems well worth a shot, in any event.
One small nugget of optimism
Some interesting commentary from Tocchet on what he’s noticed from his group through two games: “On the offensive side, we’re getting a lot of possession time, which is good, but we’re not translating that into many chances or shots.”
Tocchet’s perception here is an interesting match with the underlying data from the first two contests. The Canucks have rather significantly out-attempted their opposition this season, controlling nearly 54 percent of shot attempts at five-on-five (96 to 81), but have been outshot somewhat widely controlling only 45 percent of shot events (40 to 33).
At this time of year and with samples this minuscule, the usual qualifiers apply. Plus the Canucks have led in both of their contests this season, so with score effects in mind, it’s not a huge surprise they’ve been outshot.
That said, the gap between the club’s control of the run of play (as expressed by shot attempts) and its ability to generate shots on goal is wider than we’d usually expect — even over a relatively small sample.
This brings us to a blunt rule that is worth keeping in mind. Typically when we’re looking at underlying data early on in the season, we should prefer shot attempts to expected goals or shots on goal or scoring chances. That’s largely because it’s the largest sample we have.
Vancouver’s two games have featured over 170 shot attempts at five-on-five and just 73 shots. Given these are unworkably small samples, we should give precedence to the largest one at our disposal, and that’s shot attempts.
That is to say that while we wouldn’t look at the club’s shot-attempt percentage or shots-on-goal percentage and suggest they’re telling of its true talent level at this early point in the season, we should expect the lower shots-on-goal number to be more likely to regress toward the shot-attempts numbers, as opposed to the inverse.
(Photo of Arshdeep Bains celebrating a preseason goal with teammates: Bob Frid / Imagn Images)
