Why the Vancouver Canucks Will Make the Playoffs

The Vancouver Canucks didn’t get NHL media outlets to spill a ton of ink about them this summer. Can the Edmonton Oilers finally win the Stanley Cup? Can the Toronto Maple Leafs improve upon last spring’s performance and sign their big guns? Who will be the new GM of the Calgary Flames? Who do the Winnipeg Jets deal Pierre-Luc Dubois to and why not the Montreal Canadiens? Who is going to buy the Ottawa Senators?

Not helping matters is that 2022-2023 was not a very good year. The club finished 38-37-7 for 83 points, a cool 12 off the mark for the final postseason spot in the Western Conference (the Jets earned it with 95 points). They were also the architects of their own demise all too often last season.

But taking a look at what they already possess and the moves they played during the offseason, the reality is that the Canucks have what it takes to get back to the playoffs. Here’s why.

While we’re at it, don’t forget to check out the NHL odds for plenty of hockey action.

Strong Offensive Numbers

Only 16 clubs make the postseason in the NHL. That’s half the league. Guess what? The Canucks were 13^th in scoring, netting a solid 3.29 goals per match. Granted, Bo Horvat’s departure has the potential to hurt their output, but Elias Pettersson and J.T. Miller had great seasons statistically. Pettersson was good for 39 goals and 63 assists, whereas Miller netted 32 times and added 50 helpers. Andrei Kuzmenko has more of a nose for the net than as a facilitator, but no team would refuse an output of 35 goals per campaign.

Even Quinn Hughes, a defenceman, was regularly in on the action, helping to create 69 goals along with seven scores for himself.

The team’s power play flirted with the top 10, finishing 11^th with an efficiency of 22.7 per cent. Frankly, Edmonton’s 32.4 was absurd and in a league of its own, making Vancouver’s man-advantage unit pretty much top-10 calibre.

In an era of the NHL when winning often entails outscoring the opponent (it feels like the 1980s all over again), the Vancouver Canucks have the firepower to at the very least be in the hunt for lower Wild Card seeds in the West.

A Full Season Under Rick Tocchet

Upon Bruce Boudreau receiving his pink slip from the club’s brass in January, there were murmurs of discontent in Vancouver’s fanbase. They may have appreciated Boudreau’s style, which is fair play, but the reality was that the Canucks weren’t winning. In fact, they specialized in taking 2-0 and 3-1 leads only to crumble in defeat.

Rick Tocchet isn’t as colourful as Boudreau, but you know what? The team played better. Not by leaps and bounds, but one got the sense that some stability was instilled in the dressing room and on the ice. Case in point, they emerged victorious in 20 of the 36 contests he managed. Vancouver officially had a winning record under Tocchet. Not a great one, but they weren’t winning that much before.

The hope here is that the club can carry that relative success from the second half of last season into this new campaign. It’s not as though the team’s makeup is radically different and Tocchet got these guys to understand what it takes to win more consistently.

Offseason Moves and Returning Faces

In the case of the Vancouver Canucks, it’s almost as much about the offseason moves as it is about players who were already on the roster but who hardly saw any action. The prime example of the latter is former Detroit Red Wing Filip Hronek. He came over to Vancouver at the trade deadline but quickly suffered a shoulder injury which cut his time on the ice last year to four contests.

His presence is expected to bolster a defence that was, admittedly, weak. Vancouver also acquired Seattle Kraken defenceman Carson Soucy, although he’s currently injured and listed as week-to-week (what is it with the Canucks and newly signed blue liners?). Soucy brings the experience of someone who was on a team that missed the postseason one year, only to pick itself up and make a good run the following campaign. That’s exactly what the Canucks are trying to do here.

Finally, sticking with the defence, there’s Ian Cole. The 16-year veteran has spent years on quality rosters, from the Pittsburgh Penguins Stanley Cup winning sides, a resurgent Carolina Hurricanes franchise, and most recently a year spent with the models of consistency, the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Given that defence was an issue in 2022-2023, no one can argue that the Canucks haven’t tried to fix that heading into the new year.

Road Warriors

The typical philosophy in professional team sports is that a club should handle its business at home and just get by when playing away.

One of the things that ended up hurting Vancouver last year was, incidentally, the team’s performances at Rogers Arena. They only went 19-20-2 at home, which won’t do any favours to a club hoping to reach the playoffs. Conversely, they were an impressive 19-17-5 as the visiting team. For all their failures, technically the squad still finished above .500 on the road.

So if they can win in hostile territory, realistically they just need to take care of a few extra games at home, which is something any semi-respectable unit can do.

Quibbles: Goaltending and Penalty Killing

Here is where the argument may take a hit. It’s unclear what the Canucks have in net. Thatcher Demko shared starts with Spencer Martin and Collin Delia. The last time Demko was the main guy in net for Vancouver was two seasons ago and his figures were good: 33-22-7 with a GAA of 2.72 and a save percentage of .915.

Martin and Delia are gone, replaced by former Penguin Casey DeSmith. The question here is whether Demko replicates those 2021-2022 statistics, assuming he even gets most of the starts. DeSmith has some decent seasons in Pittsburgh, but his numbers fell off last year and hence he fell out of favour with the Penguins.

The other elephant in the room, and it’s larger than the first, is the penalty killing. The Canucks took the twelfth most penalties minutes in the NHL last year and were, hold on, dead last in penalty killing at 71.6 per cent.

It’s one thing to be more disciplined (twelfth isn’t awful per se), but that penalty killing unit was horrendous. One assumes that’s why guys like Ian Cole and Carson Soucy are now on the roster, but those are some ugly numbers that need fixing.

Prediction:

The Vancouver Canucks make the playoffs. Maybe as the second Wild Card, but they get in.