If there’s pressure, it’s on the players on the current roster and on the coaching staff to help them thrive in bigger roles.
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This we know.
But that doesn’t mean there is any more pressure now than there might have been a week ago to make a trade for a defenceman, Canucks president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford says.
“I don’t know if I’d view it as more pressure,” Rutherford told Postmedia on Wednesday morning, before admitting that, sure, trading for a defenceman has long been on the table. Everything is, always, he implied.
If there’s pressure, it’s on the players on the current roster and on the coaching staff to help them thrive in bigger roles.
“The guys worked hard at it and played the right way and stuck together,” Rutherford observed. “That’s how you have to win. Now we have to carry that over to how we play at home.”
Given the latter duo’s struggles for much of the season, it’s a big bet that they cannot just improve on what they’ve been to date, but also that they can manage to handle even more pressure than usual. An interesting caveat to all three, especially Hughes and Myers is the Canucks’ save percentage while they are on the ice so far this season, which is actually below average. They have been somewhat unlucky defensively, so the Canucks sure would like to see a positive regression in that regard right about now.
Erik Brännström has been a revelation so far. Added as an afterthought before the dawn of the season in a trade with the Colorado Avalanche, the former Ottawa Senators star-of-the-future has proven to be a reliable puck-carrying, two-way defenceman for the Canucks, relieving some of that trade-for-a-top-defenceman pressure that existed since last summer’s free agency yielded only a pair of new depth defencemen in Derek Forbort and Vincent Desharnais. Brännström has changed the narrative of what the Canucks’ third pair can be.
In the long run, when Hronek returns and assuming everyone else remains healthy, the Canucks’ defensive rotation will look good if Soucy has an upgraded partner playing behind Hughes and Hronek. That would allow Myers to slide down to the third pair with Brännström, with Forbort, hopefully recovered soon, Juulsen and Desharnais as quality depth.