Over the weekend, the “Pucks On Net” podcast — a local Canucks fan show — shared an amusing image of some dated Canucks jerseys still retailing at the team’s official store.
Displayed on hangers in front of more recent designs was a David Booth No. 7 Reebok sweater and a Maxim Lapierre No. 40 jersey. Lapierre saw the image and got in on the joke, amusingly suggesting that the markdown on these two sweaters should include an actual cash incentive to take one of these bad boys home.
I think the @Canucks are paying people to take them right? 😅😅😅 https://t.co/GKp99zmG2q
— Maxim Lapierre (@Lappy14) July 13, 2024
There’s an idle joyfulness that fans will always derive from the act of “remembering some guys.” It’s a sense that’s particularly sharp during the dog days of the NHL offseason.
There’s a certain regretful nostalgia that this image unintentionally taps into, however, one that goes beyond the banal irony of remembering the latter stages of the franchise’s golden era.
Lapierre and Booth, you may recall, were top-nine contributors for the 2011-12 Presidents’ Trophy-winning Canucks team that was unceremoniously bounced in the first round by the eventual Stanley Cup Champion Los Angeles Kings in just five games. It makes sense, on the back of a napkin anyway, that spare inventory from that 2011-12 team — produced in anticipation of a long playoff run that never materialized — might still linger in various warehouses, infrequently surfacing among the more in-demand merchandise.
There’s even a rueful accomplishment hidden in this memory. Because as disappointing as Vancouver’s truncated 2012 playoff run was, the Canucks followed up on it by qualifying for the postseason again the next year, during the lockout abbreviated 2012-13 campaign. That 2013 version of the Canucks were promptly swept by the San Jose Sharks.
It was a bitter disappointment at the time, and when head coach Alain Vigneault’s termination promptly followed, it marked the beginning of the end of an era.
Looking back a decade on, however, those short-lived playoff appearances in 2012 and 2013 have taken on something of a new meaning for the Canucks franchise. Those seasons now mark the most recent pair of years in which the Canucks qualified for the playoffs in consecutive seasons.
Based on what this Canucks team showed last year and the seemingly savvy moves Canucks management orchestrated this summer, it’s a streak that we should reasonably expect the Canucks to put an end to in April of 2025.
Vancouver is currently priced at an average of -240 “To Make the Playoffs” in 2025 by the Vegas sports books, which is an implied probability north of 70 percent. This Canucks team isn’t just a probable playoff team at this juncture, they’re a playoff team with enough quality and sustainable heft that they’ve even got some margin for error.
In previous summers we’ve dwelled on what needs to go right for the Canucks to make the playoffs, but that’s a bar that we have to raise. Last season’s standards, “We’re a playoff team if everything goes right,” have been shredded now. This group has earned that.
At this juncture, where the breaks are more likely to matter for the Canucks, and where they’re more worthwhile to consider and unpack, is when we consider Vancouver’s ceiling. The big question for this summer shouldn’t be “Will the Canucks make the playoffs,” it’s “Can this group emerge as a genuine Stanley Cup contender”?
What marginal improvements are essential to steer this team toward that level? What still needs to go Vancouver’s way for this team to be considered among the small handful of Stanley Cup favourites when the playoffs begin in the late spring of 2025?
Let’s chart out the Canucks’ roadmap to being a bona fide Stanley Cup contender with a focus on the macro, big-picture elements that go into team performance. We’ll focus on specific questions that pertain to individuals in the Canucks core a bit later this week.
Maintain top-of-the-lineup edge
Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but there seemed to be some hint of signal in the way Connor McDavid dominated during the 2024 Stanley Cup playoffs, or how the Florida Panthers’ picked their teeth with all comers whenever Aleksander Barkov and Gustav Forsling were on the ice at five-on-five.
For the first time in a generation, it seems like the NHL game is evolving to where outcomes are more star driven than they have been since the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Depth will always matter in hockey, especially in the Stanley Cup playoffs, but so long as shooting percentage continues to rise year over year, true talent will be predominant and the performance of the NHL’s best players will accordingly become more reliably decisive in determining wins and losses.
What the Canucks achieved during the 2023-24 season is further evidence of this trend. When Quinn Hughes shared the ice with at least one of Elias Pettersson or J.T. Miller (or both) last season, Vancouver stomped their opponents. The margin, in fact, was a little bit silly. Vancouver outscored their opponents 60-29 with Hughes and at least one of their top two centremen on the ice at the same time last season.
Vancouver’s top-end stars weren’t just good last year. They routinely throttled their opposition.
Now, this shouldn’t take away from the contributions of Vancouver’s depth scorers, or strong team-level defence, or the emergence of the Conor Garland-Dakota Joshua duo as a legitimate five-on-five engine. Within the context of an NHL game, however, that’s evolving to more heavily weigh the impact of star-level contributors, it was the Canucks’ best players that were primarily responsible for what turned out to be an enormously special campaign.
If the Canucks are going to be a legitimate contending team they’ll need to maintain this type of cutting edge with their sharpest weapons on the ice at five-on-five. And to some extent, that won’t necessarily be straightforward.
As dominant as the Canucks were when Hughes shared the ice with at least one of Pettersson and Miller last season, there was probably some good fortune in that, some of which may prove ephemeral. Where Vancouver outscored their opponents by much better than a two-to-one ratio in those minutes, after all, the shots on goal margin was far finer (462 to 413). There’s at least some favourable percentages noise that likely accentuated the extent to which Vancouver crushed their opponents at the top of the lineup last season, and that could come back to Earth next year.
This isn’t to say that Vancouver is in trouble if their star players merely win their minutes, as opposed to going Harlem Globetrotters on the rest of the league with the sort of regularity we saw this past season. It’s wildly impressive, for example, that the Canucks still outscored their opposition at five-on-five last season in minutes when none of Hughes, Miller or Pettersson were on the ice.
That’s the mark of a good team. If Vancouver is going to be more than that, however, then their top end needs to sustain something approximating the dizzying form they exhibited throughout last season.
Sustain elite defensive form
The Canucks’ defensive excellence was evident at the outset last season, but it went up a level as the 2023-24 campaign progressed.
And it needed to. As the power-play goals dried up down the stretch, and Thatcher Demko’s injury removed the club’s safety net, and the offence sputtered, Vancouver checked its way around a multitude of problems. It was Vancouver’s lockdown defensive game that ultimately secured the Pacific Division and held off the hard-charging Edmonton Oilers down the stretch.
This Canucks team is poised, once again, to be extraordinarily difficult for their opposition to break down next season. Between their size on the back end, their host of reliable faceoff winners down the middle, their two-way talent up and down the lineup and their disciplined execution of a thoughtful game plan — even Vancouver’s conservative puck management impulses are in service of denying rush chances against, and defending Sedin-style by holding the puck 150 feet from your own net — the Canucks have the makings of a defensive monster.
That hard-won identity, a remarkable departure from the river hockey that characterized the end of Bruce Boudreau’s tenure, is at the core of what this Canucks team was last season. It needs to remain a pillar of what they are next season if this team is going to force itself into the conversation as a legitimate Cup contender.
Identify Bo Horvat’s replacement five-on-four
The Canucks missed Bo Horvat on the power play more than I expected they would.
Now obviously Horvat had been the club’s leading power-play goal scorer and is a savant in the bumper. He singlehandedly seemed to elevate the Islanders power play from moribund to roughly average in his first full season on Long Island too, even rotating out and looking legitimately lethal on the flank.
Still, in retrospect, I think I underrated the extent to which Horvat’s abilities on retrievals, at the net front and in working to find quiet ice would prove difficult to replace — especially when the Canucks power play went on a two-month bender to start the year.
By the end of the season, however, it was undeniable. Elias Lindholm did better than Pius Suter and Andrei Kuzmenko and Garland, but in truth, the Canucks never really found a great fit for the fifth forward to complement their quartet of Miller, Pettersson, Hughes and Brock Boeser. Behind Boeser, Pettersson and Miller their fourth-highest-scoring forward on the power play last season topped out at three goals. That isn’t going to get it done.
Finding the full-time Horvat replacement has to be one of the key tasks for Rick Tocchet over the summer, at training camp and in the early part of the season.
Incoming free agent Jake DeBrusk is likely to get the first look, but he’s a bit short on experience working in the bumper spot and has only logged about 421 power-play minutes over the past three seasons (for comparison’s sake, Miller and Pettersson have logged double that amount of ice time). It’s important not to view this as a knock on DeBrusk specifically, and his lack of usage — both in the bumper and overall — can be largely explained by him having spent most of his career on the same team as Patrice Bergeron, who was one of the best to ever do it.
That said, DeBrusk’s fit on the power play isn’t an analogous situation to when Edmonton brought in Zach Hyman, who had proven to be an elite presence at the specific role that the Oilers required five-on-four. Especially when you factor in that DeBrusk’s power-play production profile — his points rate ranks 114th out of the 161 NHL forwards that have logged at least 400 minutes on the power play over the past three seasons — is somewhat pedestrian.
DeBrusk could be the answer and it isn’t a thin value bet to suggest that he is necessarily, but, there’s a fair bit of projection in it.
Whether it’s DeBrusk, or Dakota Joshua, or Hronek, one of Garland or Suter putting in the work over the offseason and figuring it out, or another piece to be added later, Vancouver’s power play needs to be elite — or at least more consistently dangerous — for this team to contend next season. And to get to that level, the club needs to find that fifth player capable of elevating PP1.
Keep levelling up short-handed
The Canucks penalty kill improved tremendously last season.
Vancouver’s short-handed play went from being a multiyear sore spot — the club was historically permissive at four-on-five across both the 2021-22 and 2022-23 campaigns — to being league average last season. And truly the club’s penalty killing was trending in an even more favourable direction than that, both down the stretch and into the postseason, where Vancouver’s penalty killing made a real difference against the Nashville Predators and the Oilers.
Roughly league average, if the Canucks can sustain it, is enough for Vancouver to be a formidable side given the club’s strength in other areas. The truth, however, is that killing penalties is essential to going on a deep playoff run. The only team that advanced to the conference finals without sporting a penalty-killing rate north of 80 percent this past season was the Oilers, whose numbers were deflated by sub-NHL level goaltending in the first month of the season and who found a totally different gear killing penalties in the postseason once their save percentage normalized.
Losing Lindholm and Ian Cole will force Adam Foote and the Canucks coaching staff to adapt short-handed, not to mention the departure of assistant coach Mike Yeo who ran Vancouver’s penalty kill so successfully last season. Of course incoming players like Derek Forbort, Vincent Desharnais, Danton Heinen and Jake DeBrusk are quality penalty-killing options, so the club will have some decent clay to work with in moulding their penalty-killing units.
It’s crucial that the Canucks don’t just maintain their roughly average penalty-killing form from last season. If this club is going to elevate and become a contender, the Canucks need to outright improve four-on-five this upcoming season.
One surprise “pop” contributor from pipeline
In the first two, chaotic seasons of the Jim Rutherford era, Vancouver’s fortunes sagged as Canucks hockey operations worked to untangle the cap mess they inherited and pivot away from a dysfunctional situation with their head coach that ultimately spilled over into public view.
Those were more difficult times for the club, but now that they’re behind us, there’s some value to having gone through it: the club selected twice in the first half of the first round at the NHL Draft in consecutive years in 2022 and 2023.
High-scoring wing prospect Jonathan Lekkerimäki and intriguing right-handed defenseman Tom Willander are the product of those seasons. And while we would fairly describe it as a “hope bet” that they could be counted on to help a good team win games at the NHL level as early as this upcoming season, it’s absolutely not outside the realm of possibility.
Lekkerimäki will be a full-time North American professional player this upcoming season, and is coming off of a historic draft-plus-one year based on his production at the SHL level. It’s a reasonable possibility that with a strong summer and a standout training camp, Lekkerimäki could be a top-nine contributor this season. It’s less likely that Lekkerimäki would prove to be a significant answer to boost the top six or be the player the club is looking for on the first power-play unit this upcoming season, but there’s no reason to put a cap on high-scoring players with Lekkerimäki’s pedigree.
The likelihood of Willander contributing at the NHL level this upcoming season is somewhat more remote, but it’s also possible. Willander is heading back to Boston University for his sophomore campaign, and with his talent and pedigree, if he’s able to contribute more offensively this season, he could be an option to turn pro in the spring and join the club in time for the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Ideally it’s one of the club’s top two prospects, but it would matter too if a dark horse prospect like Arshdeep Bains or Cole McWard or Elias Pettersson (the defender) was able to contribute meaningfully too. If the club could find a real player from a surprising source in their prospect pipeline next season, especially if it’s one of their top two prospects that rapidly develops and “pops,” that would go a long way toward raising the Canucks’ ceiling.
(Photo of Elias Pettersson and Quinn Hughes: Jeff Vinnick / NHLI via Getty Images)
