The Canucks’ defence is young and promising. They need forwards, though.
The Vancouver Canucks may have found themselves at a standstill on trade deadline, but when you back up and focus on the overall state of the defence corps, you can see some progress there anyway.
Adding Marcus Pettersson on Jan. 31 the final piece in the roster shuffle that began with moving on from J.T. Miller was an essential reset of a defensive group that was struggling.
Struggling because Canucks management — and their pro scouts — misfired in their initial assessments last summer. Vincent Desharnais was not a solution. Noah Juulsen was always going to be a stopgap.
And Carson Soucy somehow ceased to be the effective player he’d been last season.
So around Christmas the Canucks started thinking about changing the mix of their blue line. Everything was too static.
Elias (Junior) Pettersson had long been a blueliner the Canucks had high hopes for. He’s now delivering.
And then there’s Victor Mancini, the big defenceman the Canucks acquired in a trade from the New York Rangers in the Miller trade, who is already playing a role on this blue line.
That’s two young defencemen already in the mix — and getting young defencemen in the mix is a good sign for the future. And then there’s Tom Willander, who is fully expected to sign once his Boston University season is over.
He’s not going to be a game changer right off the hop, but if all goes well he will change the dynamic of the top four.
And then you’re talking about three young defenceman changing the whole conversation around your blue line.
Rick Tocchet said that his coaching focus has indeed changed over the past month. His roster is now the seventh-youngest in the NHL. This is a team with a handful of veteran stars and a handful of young players.
“There’s a standard that the coaches here and the organization have. This is what the Vancouver Canucks do,” he said after the Canucks’ 3-1 win Friday.
“We have to teach them the standard. And the guys that are here, the older guys, they have to teach them, too.”
That’s the good part. It’s the forward part that needs to progress. They do need to find a centre who is more than Filip Chytil. He’s a fine player, but he’s a shadow of Miller. And that, let’s be clear, remains the challenge for this team, and its management, going forward.
It’s not just about needing Elias Pettersson to get back to where he was. It’s about also rebuilding what Miller brought to the table in seasons past. Perhaps that will take a Moneyball-style approach, where the Canucks rebuild his offensive influence in the aggregate.
When this team was firing, Miller was a force. There’s just no getting around that. He was an important power play player. He took big faceoffs. He could dominate a shift like few others on the team. Just think of what he meant to the team in the playoffs last year.
That’s very, very hard to replace.
But the Canucks have to.
SICK BAY — Quinn Hughes’s status remains shrouded in mystery. He’s been skating some, but what skating he did do Friday morning was pretty tentative and he didn’t do any work with pucks. He skated before Friday’s morning skate with skills coach Jason Krog. Tocchet acknowledged Friday that Hughes is dealing with a lower body problem, an injury that developed as he tried to come back from an oblique injury. He overcompensated, Tocchet said. Hughes didn’t skate Saturday. … Thatcher Demko’s timeline is similarly murky. He practised on his own on Saturday morning but hasn’t been in a practice with his teammates since before he suffered his injury before the 4-Nations Face-off break.