The Vancouver Canucks, still seeking their first win of the 2024-25 season, will face the defending Stanley Cup champions on the edge of the Everglades on Thursday night.
It’s a tough assignment, even if the Florida Panthers will be without a pair of superstar forwards in centre Aleksander Barkov and power forward Matthew Tkachuk.
Coming off of their worst game of the regular season to this point, the Canucks aren’t in real trouble yet but will want to arrest this early season slide before it persists into something that actually puts them behind the eight ball. Their schedule, after all, will do them no favours before the calendar flips to November.
With more on Elias Pettersson’s mystifying form, Erik Brännström’s risk/reward profile and the struggles of Vancouver’s depth defenders, let’s open our notebook and gear up for a fascinating tilt between a Canucks team that should start to get a bit desperate and the short-handed defending champs.
Inside Erik Brännström’s high-risk, high-reward puck-moving impact
The puck-moving struggles of Vancouver’s bottom-four defence have stood out as a glaring issue through three games. Could Brännström, an undersized left-handed defender who can play both sides of the blue line, be the internal fix? Irfaan Gaffar reported on Wednesday that the Canucks will be calling Brännström up. However, that move isn’t yet reflected on the NHL roster page.
The 25-year-old Swede is an agile skater with excellent hands and puck skills. He’s capable of being a confident, assertive puck transporter. Brännström will certainly inject much-needed pace and skill into Vancouver’s breakout arsenal, although the numbers show he’s a high-risk, high-reward contributor in this area.
Corey Sznajder is the creator of All Three Zones, a project that manually tracks select games for every team in the NHL. According to Sznajder’s data, Brännström engineered 6.98 defensive zone exits with possession (with a carry-out or clean breakout pass rather than just a glass-and-out exit) for every 60 minutes he was on the ice last season. That was the second-highest rate of all Ottawa Senators defencemen behind Jake Sanderson. This tells us Brännström is indeed above-average at breaking the puck out with control.
He is, however, also more turnover-prone than the average defender. Last season, he failed to get the puck out of the defensive zone on 33.8 percent of his exit attempts, compared to the league-average 26.2 percent.
How should we interpret this data? There will likely be some games in which Brännström will break pucks out impressively and look indispensable to the lineup as if he’s a huge diamond in the rough. But there will likely be other nights where he undoes that goodwill because of costly turnovers. Brännström’s goal will be to prove that the upside of his transition skill set outweighs the risk.
The Senators had promising play-controlling numbers during Brännström’s sheltered minutes over the last two seasons. On the other hand, coaches often prefer the safe option over a volatile one like Brännström, even though the latter’s upside might be higher.
What makes him a volatile player? We can look at some of the tape from his preseason games with the Colorado Avalanche to find those weaknesses.
In the play below, he commits a brutal turnover up the middle in the defensive zone. Brännström can still recover from this position and hold the fort defensively, but he compounds the mistake by desperately diving to try to check the puck carrier. That fails, which leaves his partner completely out to dry, leading to an easy tap-in goal for Vegas. This type of atrocious defensive zone sequence could instantly get a player benched.
Earlier in the same game, he bobbled the puck at the point and it led to a clean breakaway chance for the Golden Knights:
The Canucks’ bottom four has struggled so mightily and needs the type of mobility and puck transportation Brännström can offer so badly that he deserves a fair shot to play NHL games despite his warts and risks. Brännström’s undersized frame and high-risk playing style make it unlikely he’ll stick as an everyday lineup fixture for the entire season, but Vancouver simply needs a band-aid solution until closer to the trade deadline when it can add external pieces, which is a box he could check if he can minimize his loud mistakes.
Carson Soucy’s sluggish start and his role in stabilizing the bottom four
Carson Soucy was the Canucks’ third-best defenceman last year, despite the time he missed with injury.
He successfully held down a full-time top-four role, absorbed tough matchups against the opposition’s top lines and drove sparkling defensive results with strong chance suppression numbers and an excellent 1.79 goals-against-per-hour rate at five-on-five. Soucy’s pair struggled to drive offence — in part because they don’t have a bona fide top-four righty who can move the puck and add a more dynamic offensive element — but that’s not really a knock on him.
When he’s at his best, Soucy’s massive wingspan, disruptive stickwork, solid skating and defensive IQ make him a true second-pair-calibre defensive defenceman. Looking at the Canucks’ current bottom four, he should be the best defenceman of the bunch. He can’t singlehandedly save the Canucks in non-Quinn Hughes minutes, but he should at least be part of the solution.
Through three games, Soucy hasn’t looked like that steady version of himself yet.
The Canucks were outshot 12-1 at five-on-five with Soucy on the ice against the Tampa Bay Lightning. Overall, they’ve been outshot 26-9 and outscored 3-1 during his five-on-five shifts so far. He’s also made a couple of uncharacteristic defensive blunders — he didn’t pick up Brayden Point during Tampa Bay’s 2-0 goal on Tuesday night and he failed to properly box Jonathan Huberdeau out in front of the goal crease during Calgary’s 5-4 go-ahead goal in the third period.
Big picture, we’re not worried about Soucy. We’re confident he’ll bounce back defensively, even if the second pair’s inability to drive offence could remain a concern until a bona fide top-four righty to play with Soucy can potentially be acquired.
But we bring up Soucy’s slow start because there’s a big difference between Vancouver’s bottom four being a weakness that requires an eventual upgrade but is serviceable for now versus it being a full-blown problem. So far, the Canucks’ bottom four has looked more like the latter.
The good news is it could become passable in the short term if Soucy can shrug off this poor start and return to the level he showed last season. That seems like a more realistic hope for driving better bottom-four results than expecting the likes of Derek Forbort, Noah Juulsen and Vincent Desharnais to suddenly become quality puck-movers.
Why history is on Elias Pettersson’s side
The mystifying form that has afflicted Pettersson going back about 50 games or so now is a topic of constant conversation and consternation among Canucks fans. Truthfully, it probably should be.
Pettersson has been a superstar-level contributor for most of his NHL career. A two-way ace producing at a point per game in their early 20s at a premium position is just about the rarest thing in hockey, and among the most valuable.
For a player like Pettersson, who has been able to maintain an extraordinarily high level of play with just a brief blip in the first half of 2021-22, to suddenly go 34 consecutive games (between the regular season and the postseason) without scoring a five-on-five goal is baffling.
Speculation has raged as to the root cause of Pettersson’s poor form. There’s certainly an injury angle to factor in given Pettersson dealt with tendinitis down the stretch of last season and had to train around the ailment this past summer. Linemate quality, questions about whether Vancouver’s structure positions him to be at his best, and the noise around Pettersson — with speculation about his contract status and criticism about his play reaching a fever pitch throughout last season — have all been discussed as factors or partial explanations.
The mystery only adds fuel to the conversation. Pettersson hasn’t been his usual productive, assertive self for an extended stretch now and no one really understands why.
Finding a way to help Pettersson get his groove back is about as high-leverage a question for the Canucks as any question you could possibly pose. In an increasingly star-driven league, one in which shooting percentage is rising steadily year over year, the best players in hockey are more impactful than ever.
In an NHL environment that seems ripe for Pettersson to thrive in, however, and on a team with more options and talent than nearly any he’s played on in his career, Pettersson’s impact has never been at a lower ebb.
As frustrating as it’s been for Canucks fans to observe and as inexplicable as the whole thing is, it’s worth noting the NHL players who’ve produced as much as Pettersson has, this early in their career, for this long a period, are almost always durable star-level contributors. We can certainly find examples of players hitting extraordinary highs for a year or two, but NHL players historically don’t sustain a point-per-game production rate over 400 games in their early 20s and suddenly become pedestrian contributors.
To get a sense of Pettersson’s historical comparables, we built a cohort of NHL forwards who produced between 1-1.2 points per game before their 26th birthday while appearing in at least 350 games. Since 1990, only 19 players match this criteria and it’s effectively a who’s who of Hall of Fame or fringe Hall of Fame-level players.
Some players on this list had injury-plagued seasons in their mid-20s (Jason Spezza), some players struggled a bit in their early 20s (Nathan MacKinnon) and some arguably haven’t delivered on their immense potential (Mitch Marner), but generally speaking, this list strongly suggests players who perform the way Pettersson has to begin their careers tend to continue to be among the NHL’s top performers.
If we drop our points-per-game requirement somewhat to 0.9 points per game, we can add 20 names to our list of comparable players. Most of the slightly lower-scoring group — Steven Stamkos, Jonathan Toews, Matthew Tkachuk, Jack Eichel, Ryan Getzlaf, Anze Kopitar — were superstar players who remained superstar players. This speaks to the fact that, directionally, we just don’t often see superstar-level players fall off randomly in the middle of their careers.
One name in this group, however, did see their production dip more significantly as their career progressed. Alexander Semin managed 354 points in 392 games between the ages of 19 and 26, then only managed north of 50 points one more time across five seasons. He was out of the NHL by age 31.
There are a ton of differences between Pettersson and Semin, however, most notably that Semin was something of a one-dimensional winger whereas Pettersson is a centre with genuine two-way chops.
In any event, the Semin outlier is an exception that all but proves the rule. Hockey history suggests only the best players in the sport do what Pettersson has already done. It’s likely only a matter of time before he gets back to putting up goals and points in bunches.
(Photo of Elias Pettersson: Kim Klement Neitzel / Imagn Images)