Evolution is necessarily a messy process.
If this Vancouver Canucks team is going to get to where it wants to go, it needs to evolve. Canucks management realized it this summer. Coaches realized it this summer, too.
This team overperformed expectations, even internal expectations, by a vast margin last season. It entered last season as a fringe playoff team and ended it as at least a fringe Stanley Cup contender.
What the Canucks accomplished last season was incredible. It was also thoughtful, deliberate and controlled.
Throughout this era of Canucks hockey, which began with the arrival of Elias Pettersson and Quinn Hughes following the retirement of Henrik and Daniel Sedin, this franchise has grappled with one central roster construction flaw: an occasionally desperate lack of quality blueliners.
As this era has waxed and waned, that central issue has defined seasons, driven costly trade and free-agency gambles, and cost coaches and executives jobs.
Even with the arrival of a true elite blueliner in Hughes, the reigning Norris winner, an overall lack of quality two-way defenders on the roster has created an environment in which this team has regularly struggled to control games. It’s forced various coaches to have to make a decision: manufacture offence or play quality defence. Rarely has this team done both effectively.
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Travis Green, for example, mostly opted to play run-and-gun hockey during his tenure. That is until his final season when he decided to reign it in and attempt to play more organized, shutdown hockey.
Under the hood, Green’s approach actually worked at five-on-five for the first 25 games of the 2021-22 campaign. That Canucks side, however, was unable to score and bled goals against on the penalty kill. Green was fired and replaced by Bruce Boudreau.
Boudreau turned the dial back toward more offensive, attacking hockey. He dispensed with structured possession-based breakouts, installing a punt-and-hunt-based scheme that worked around the limitations of Vancouver’s blueliners.
In the “Bruce There It Is!” season when the Canucks still utilized Green’s defensive systems, it worked. The next year, when Boudreau’s template was all they had to go off, the Canucks’ defensive game became untenably permissive.
Whereas Green and Boudreau struggled to find balance with the personnel at their disposal, Rick Tocchet solved the problem in his first Canucks season. The club would prioritize playing lockdown defence, but in a very specific way.
The key to how Tocchet authored one of the most impressive year-over-year defensive turnarounds in recent hockey history was how the Canucks combined personnel choices and tactics to manufacture an environment in which the players on this roster could combine to be far more than the sum of their parts.
They found the perfect complement for Hughes on the top pair in a trade for Filip Hronek. They brought in a handful of speedy, defensively conscious forwards like Anthony Beauvillier, Pius Suter and Sam Lafferty and promoted internal options that matched the job description, like Nils Åman and Phil Di Giuseppe.
With speed up front and in the bottom six especially, Vancouver tasked its forwards with backchecking like demons. The Canucks utilized a neutral zone wedge designed to funnel puck carriers toward the wall and amassed size on the back end to meet neutral zone puck carriers with aggressive squeezes at the blue line.
Almost overnight, Tocchet and Canucks management turned this club into a rock-solid defensive team.
Quinn Hughes drives past Flames forward Samuel Honzek during the third period of the Canucks’ 6-5 overtime season-opening loss. (Bob Frid / Imagn Images)
It wasn’t just about the personnel and the defensive systems, however. One of the best tricks Vancouver was able to pull off last season, perhaps the most important part of the stifling identity it created, was getting buy-in on an ethos of conservative puck management up and down the lineup. It was impressive that nearly every Canucks player brought into that approach with maniacal discipline.
The structure the 2023-24 Canucks executed to great effect was often built around measured, controlled puck management — both on the breakout and in-zone. The Canucks didn’t trade scoring chances with their opponents, in part because they weren’t aggressively trying to create them.
Vancouver, instead, was focused on zone time. On stacking heavy shifts one on top of the other, ideally with partial changes ongoing throughout. On grinding opponents down and defending in the offensive zone by dominating possession.
It relied on second-stick opportunities and opportunistic finishing, rather than attempting to generate chances in bulk. That approach meant fewer breakdowns and fewer opportunities for both sides to attack in transition.
This is what’s so fascinating about hockey as a game. It’s a dynamic sport, one in which skaters are always both attacking and defending simultaneously, even if we mostly discuss defensive play in terms of what occurs away from the puck.
What Tocchet’s Canucks attempted to do, and succeeded in doing, worked to great effect last season. It was propped up, however, by an ungodly level of shooting efficiency, which is a volatile foundation on which to build.
That’s why this evolution is necessary. The Canucks generated shots at five-on-five at the 25th-highest rate in the NHL last season. Only one team that ranked lower than them made the playoffs, and no team that was below average in this category qualified for the conference finals.
The Stanley Cup Final, meanwhile, was contested by the best team in the league at generating shots at even strength and the third-best team in this category.
When the quality of competition ramps up in the playoffs, the teams that struggle to reliably generate looks are dead in the water. They become reliant on bounces, or moments of transcendent skill from elite players to bail them out.
As impressive as Tocchet’s work was last season, there’s another level this team has to hit offensively if it’s going to get deeper into the playoffs with a credible shot at becoming champions. To their credit, the organization was self-aware enough to recognize it and go about deliberately addressing it this summer.
So Jake DeBrusk was the top free-agent priority, a north-south scoring winger with big-game experience who would flesh out the top-six forward group.
The Canucks brought in speedy, two-way wingers with solid five-on-five scoring profiles in Kiefer Sherwood and Danton Heinen to bolster their depth.
Daniel Sprong is a brilliant heat-check goal scorer, signed off of the mid-July scrap heap to a one-year value contract.
Then the Canucks prioritized transition play and rush attacking throughout training camp and in the preseason. The emphasis shifted, as Tocchet attempted to turn the dial from the effective style of grinding out wins and utilizing conservative puck management as a defensive weapon to attacking off of the rush with aggression and intention.
For 20 minutes on Wednesday night, the experiment looked like a smash success. Vancouver’s forward skill looked incredible and the pace and dynamism of the rush attack looked several levels beyond anything they seemed capable of last season.
Then the game turned, and the trade-offs became more apparent, too. Ultimately, the Canucks lost their season opener 6-5 in baffling fashion on Wednesday night.
After 20 minutes of absolute dominance in front of a raucous home crowd, Vancouver was outmuscled, outwilled and outplayed in the latter 40 minutes by a rebuilding Calgary Flames side.
It’s one game, and truthfully, the result was uglier and more disappointing than the Canucks’ actual form — which is why results need to be taken with several heapings of salt when the samples are small.
A painful loss shouldn’t obscure that the Canucks played entertaining, effective attacking hockey in the early phases of their first game. It shouldn’t alter our view that with the new additions up front, this forward group looked nasty in a very good way.
On the other hand, there’s no escaping the reality that Vancouver coughed up its early 4-1 lead so thoroughly that it was trailing as the minutes ticked off the clock toward the end of regulation. That rarely happened when they were playing more controlled, structured hockey last season.
Big picture, the disappointment of Wednesday night’s collapse shouldn’t linger. The club picked up a point, minimizing the harm done. There were some concerning elements in Vancouver’s game from a goal-prevention perspective, but there were also genuine signs of evolutionary progress from the Canucks as an attacking team.
In retrospect, it was probably unrealistic to expect Vancouver to attempt to turn the dial toward creativity and find the sweet spot right off the hop, something Tocchet himself acknowledged postgame.
“We were heavy in training camp on a lot of transition and stuff and I was a little bit worried about this because we got a little bit away from our identity,” Tocchet said.
“Our play without the puck was not good. That’s a year-and-a-half-ago hockey,” continued the Canucks coach, specifically referring to the history of this club’s development.
“It’s only one game, but we have to be careful here because we’re a good team without the puck and we didn’t protect the guts of the ice, guys were swinging and stuff like that doesn’t win … I have to take a little bit of the blame because we were heavy this year at camp on the transitional stuff, now we did defensive zone drills, but not as many as we did last year. Now, it’s one game. Players know they have to be in certain spots and they weren’t. If it’s a trend for four or five games, I’d be worried. We’ll sharpen up tomorrow.”
That really captures the process we’ll watch unfold as Vancouver attempts to build on — but not fundamentally alter — the identity it forged last season. There’s a ceiling, after all — as this club was sage enough to recognize — to what it can accomplish if it’s too stuck in a more conservative mode.
There are real questions about whether or not this club can get there. Attempting to play a more aggressive, attacking brand of hockey given the question marks in net isn’t necessarily ideal. And, of course, attacking off of the rush is exceptionally difficult to pull off systematically, given it’s dependent on factors outside of a team’s direct control.
Consider that to attack vertically off of the rush, the puck has to physically be in your end of the rink. Your opponents have to be out of position, at least a little bit. Ideally, you’re catching them leaning.
Then a team has to string together a series of difficult sequences. A defensive play — whether it’s a knifed puck, a body pinned along the wall, or a turnover forced — has to force a change of possession. Then there needs to be a quick outlet to key the rush.
There are chances being taken, calculated risks at play in all of those engagements. No matter how impressive Vancouver’s forwards look when carrying the puck with pace through the neutral zone, is the controlled way the Canucks played hockey last season, especially in terms of how structured their non-Hughes blueliners were in how they moved the puck, fundamentally incongruent with consistently creating rush offence?
And can Vancouver’s defenders key the rush successfully enough when the Hughes and Hronek pair isn’t on the ice to connect play?
We can ask these questions, but it’s impossible to have definitive answers after one game. We probably won’t have definitive answers after 30 games.
What matters, after all, isn’t how pretty or entertaining the hockey is. What matters is whether or not the Canucks can win more games and go deeper into the Stanley Cup playoffs if they’re generating quality scoring opportunities at a higher rate.
What matters is whether or not the experiment, the effort to evolve into a true contender, works.
On opening night, the Canucks’ performance provided us with mixed results and underlined the difficulty of what Tocchet and Canucks management are attempting to do.
Evolution might be necessarily messy, and Vancouver’s opening night performance certainly was. But it’s also essential, even in spite of the inevitable growing pains.
(Photo of Jonathan Huberdeau and the Flames celebrating after scoring on Arturs Silovs: Derek Cain / Getty Images)
