The Vancouver Canucks flew to Ottawa on Thursday to begin a six-game road trip that stands out as a potential inflection point in this still-young campaign.
Vancouver is deeply short-handed and will remain so at least for the beginning of the trip. The Canucks are coming off a wildly disappointing homestand in which they dropped four of six contests in regulation, and they probably played worse than that record would indicate.
It’s a testament to the start this club got off to and the high floor this team has hit that it remains solidly in the mix in the Pacific Division. This road swing, meanwhile, represents both a significant challenge and an opportunity.
The schedule itself isn’t imposing. Over the next 11 days, the Canucks will face off against a variety of weaker sides. Their opponents are effectively a who’s who of teams outside the Eastern Conference playoff spots before the road trip concludes with a matchup against Kirill Kaprizov’s impressive Minnesota Wild. It’ll be essential for the Canucks to sort themselves out on this trip and bank enough points to tread water in the divisional standings, and that should be achievable regardless of the difficulty of the club’s current circumstances.
Let’s open our notebook and get into some of the pressing items surrounding the team and the big-picture questions that Canucks management is weighing at this crucial moment of the season.
The state of the roster
I asked around this week and on Thursday afternoon was able to confirm the roster mechanics of J.T. Miller’s leave.
Miller, away from the club indefinitely for personal reasons, is currently off the Canucks’ 23-man roster as an Injured Non-Roster player.
Injured non-roster functions the way that normal Injured Reserve does for the most part — Miller’s cap hit still counts on the books but the club gets an extra spot on the 23-man roster — the only exception is that it’s somewhat more flexible. A player placed on IR is ineligible to return for at least a week but Miller is eligible to be activated at any time.
The flexibility is irrelevant in this instance. While Miller’s absence is indefinite, he won’t be back in under seven days and isn’t expected to return to the lineup for the duration of this road trip at the very least.
As Vancouver sets out on this marathon road trip, however, the club only has 22 active players on the 23-man roster and doesn’t have the flexibility to add a call-up from Abbotsford for the moment. Their flexibility isn’t limited by roster space, it’s actually about the salary cap.
As we’ve covered exhaustively over the past several months, the Canucks want to avoid utilizing Long-Term Injured Reserve (LTIR), which would provide the club with some short-term cap flexibility but would prevent it from tolling cap space daily.
With an eye toward maximizing its cap space and the ability to add talent to the roster ahead of the trade deadline, Vancouver is currently eschewing the use of LTIR, even in managing the status of players that would be eligible for it like Thatcher Demko and Derek Forbort. With Miller, Demko, Forbort and Brock Boeser all remaining on the books cap-wise, the Canucks are pressed up against the upper limit with 22 active players on the roster and not enough cap space remaining to call up a 23rd.
While this will create something of a roster and cap crunch for the team at the outset of this road trip, the sense I get is that in Boeser, Demko and Forbort’s case, some reinforcements should begin arriving in relatively short order.
The defence and the trade market
The state of the Canucks blue line has been a hot topic for fans and media through the first six weeks of the season.
While Quinn Hughes and Filip Hronek have been a dominant force on the top pair, and Erik Brännström and Vincent Desharnais have formed an effective, sheltered third pair, Carson Soucy and Tyler Myers have had a tough go as a duo through the first 18 games.
In nearly 205 five-on-five minutes as a pair this season, Soucy and Myers have been outshot 106-58 and have been outscored by a commensurate margin (five goals for, 13 goals against). As well as they performed in the 2024 Stanley Cup playoffs the play of the second pair has been problematic in the early going this season, and the seams have been especially evident when Vancouver has battled higher-quality opponents with more dynamic attacking depth.
This is why the club is eager to get Forbort back into the lineup. Forbort’s return will give the Canucks another defender with size and, accordingly, more options to experiment and find solutions with different second-pair combinations.
I do believe that size concerns have held Brännström back, as well as he’s performed, in terms of earning an elevated role in the lineup. That said, his usage is ticking up, and all indications are that the comfort level of Rick Tocchet and his staff with leaning on the 25-year-old defender appears to be increasing with each passing game.
To this point, Soucy and Myers have remained a fixed pair for every game this season. If their struggles. continue for much longer, however, the club recognizes that it’ll have to consider trying something different to find an internal fix.
It was roughly a year ago that the club acquired Nikita Zadorov in a trade with the Calgary Flames, a deal that was motivated by the Canucks’ desire to shore up the defence and protect their hot start to the 2023-24 campaign after Soucy got hurt.
It wouldn’t be a surprise if general manager Patrik Allvin were able to pull off something similar for a second consecutive season.
That said, as Vancouver’s hockey operations department weighs its options on the trade market, the calculus appears to be moderately different than it was when the club traded for Zadorov. When it comes to the state of the blue line, a topic that has long preoccupied Canucks hockey operations leadership since they arrived in Vancouver, the organization feels like they’re caught in between the present and the future and have to be mindful of precisely how they proceed.
The club is excited about the progress that Cole McWard and Elias Pettersson have made in AHL Abbotsford. We’ll likely see both players given a look at the NHL level this season, with an eye on developing them into regular contributors within a year or two.
The Canucks are also delighted about Tom Willander’s progress this season, and his evolution as a more comfortable and dynamic attacking presence from the back end in his sophomore season at Boston University. The club will likely push to sign him after the conclusion of his NCAA season.
In the WHL, Sawyer Mynio is tracking exceptionally well and is widely expected to be in the mix to play for Canada at the world juniors. The club has high hopes for his professional future after this season.
The Canucks sorely need a top-four upgrade short-term, though, and are working to identify and acquire a player who matches that description, but their appetite to pay a significant price in a trade is shaped by a sense of internal confidence that in a year or two the club is poised to have some credible in-house options with potential on the back end.
This is really the rub for Canucks management. Nearly every contender in the league is eager to land an additional top-four capable defender and the supply of potentially available trade targets is both meagre and somewhat uninspiring. As a result of this dynamic, the prices for those defenders that actually may shake loose are astronomically high at the moment.
We know that this Canucks management group isn’t going to hesitate to pay retail price — they won’t even hesitate to overpay, as we saw with Hronek — if they’re able to land a defender who would qualify as a perfect fit. If it’s a credible, multiyear top-four upgrade, the Canucks will push hard and pay a steep price. If it’s an older rental defender that the club isn’t convinced will offer a significant enough upgrade over its current options, it sounds like Vancouver may be more reluctant to move proactively and pay full freight. The Canucks don’t intend to make a trade, it seems, solely for the purpose of shaking things up on their second pair.
If they’re going to dig deep into their pockets to upgrade the blue line, and it’s clear that’s what it’s going to take, my sense of it is that they want to land a multiyear fit.
This is also why the tongue-in-cheek invocation of Zadorov’s name by Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman on Thursday is an interesting one. Whether or not repatriating Zadorov is actually a sensible or realistic option for the club, the five years of term remaining on his deal might be a better fit with Vancouver’s big-picture priorities than one of the more prominently discussed rental options.
Lekkerimäki’s cup of coffee
Before heading out east, the Canucks returned top prospect Jonathan Lekkerimäki to Abbotsford and called up 24-year-old centre Max Sasson.
Sasson, who signed with the Canucks as a college free agent in the spring of 2023, has been a standout for Abbotsford but has yet to play an NHL game. Though he’s slight for a bottom-six centre, Sasson has a high motor, plus speed, above-average hockey IQ and NHL-level wheels. He’s been solidly productive in the AHL and is a natural centre, giving the Canucks some additional positional versatility.
It seems very likely that Sasson will make his NHL debut at some point on this trip.
As for Lekkerimäki, who appeared in five games and scored a goal, the club viewed this NHL stint as an unqualified success. Tocchet — and the organization more generally — was impressed by how Lekkerimäki’s game translated to the NHL level, and by his defensive conscientiousness in particular.
Like with Arshdeep Bains and Aatu Räty earlier in the season, the club wanted to give Lekkerimäki a taste of the NHL with the intent of sending him back to Abbotsford to apply what he learned and continue to develop by dominating in the AHL. He’ll be back soon enough.
In the case of all three players, but particularly Lekkerimäki given his pedigree, the club is hopeful that some of its younger forwards will be able to be contributors by the tail end of this season. Bains, who had an especially strong outing on Tuesday night against the New York Rangers, appears to be the player who seems closest to hitting that level.
(Photo of Patrik Allvin and Jim Rutherford: Jeff Vinnick / NHLI via Getty Images)
