The Vancouver Canucks aren’t playing great hockey, but they have the look of a good team — with the potential, perhaps, to be a great team.
That’s the duality with which we’re confronted 10 games into the 2024-25 season. It’s still early and the sample is still small, of course, but based on where the team trending, we should be prepared to accept a rather complicated reality about where the Canucks sit.
The Canucks’ execution has been poor in most facets of the game and some flaws have shown through the first month of the season, but big picture, their ability to rack up points while dealing with a myriad of iffy performances, key injuries and lackadaisical defensive execution hints at a ceiling that exceeds what they possessed last season — even as everything went their way.
If this seems confusing, it sort of is. Hockey is a game that can and will fool you, especially over small samples.
This Canucks team in particular, and especially during his current era, has been especially difficult to see clearly. We’ve seen this group maintain stretches of exceptional play — the ‘Bruce there it is!’ run and the first three months of the 2023-24 season in particular — and we’ve also seen them fail to even get out of the stumbling blocks to begin their seasons in 2021-22 and 2022-23. We’ve seen them play disorganized, selfish hockey as a team; and we’ve seen them buy into playing a composed, structured team game to great effect.
This year, the Canucks appear to be stuck in second gear, never playing anything approaching inspired hockey while still accumulating 13 points in their first 10 games, the second-best mark by point percentage in the Pacific Division.
Saturday night’s contest in San Jose captured the essence of what this season has felt like, in some ways. Vancouver was in control the whole game, outclassing the Sharks at five-on-five, and victory seemed largely inevitable even though Vancouver trailed for most of the night.
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Ultimately, however, the Canucks weren’t sharp enough to secure a clear victory. The final play of the game, in which Fabian Zetterlund somehow got wide open in the slot as the Sharks pressed six-on-five, was instructive. It was an appalling, inexcusable breakdown; the sort of thing we never saw from this club one year ago.
If Zetterlund hadn’t whiffed on the slot feed with time expiring, the Canucks would have been at serious risk of frittering away their second late third-period lead in a wild 90-second span.
It was a play that, understandably, could be viewed as cause for concern. “This team doesn’t have the same level of dog in them” and all that. While that wouldn’t be an unfair statement by any means, the more accurate conclusion is somewhat more counterintuitive.
The truth is Vancouver hasn’t performed well, regardless of what its record says. It has just one clear victory and carries a negative goal differential through its first 10 games. The Canucks’ only regulation wins have come against a who’s who of future 2025 draft lottery teams like the Philadelphia Flyers, Chicago Blackhawks, Pittsburgh Penguins and Sharks.
The list of reasons for Vancouver’s porous performances is extensive. Star centre Elias Pettersson’s form has sputtered greatly in the first 10 games of this season, and the concern about his play has reached a toxic sort of fever pitch among Canucks fans. J.T. Miller has been productive, but has relied on playing with the top pair to drive play and has generally looked well short of 100 percent. Vancouver’s new unrestricted free-agent forward additions, with the exception of Kiefer Sherwood, have been outperformed by the wingers the team leaned on last season like Conor Garland, Nils Höglander and Pius Suter. The defense looks worse on paper, and even worse on the ice. The second pair in particular has been regularly flattened in its five-on-five minutes, especially against top teams with sufficient depth to punish the Canucks’ inability to get the puck moving without Quinn Hughes and Filip Hronek on the ice.
Meanwhile, the Canucks’ early season saviour, Kevin Lankinen, wasn’t signed until training camp was already underway. Vezina Trophy nominee starter Thatcher Demko remains without a timeline to return, although the club swears he’s making progress. And the less said about playoff hero Artūrs Šilovs’ early season form, the better.
But, inarguably, this club has still succeeded. The results have been solid and the underlying process has matched it.
At the top end of the lineup, Vancouver has unveiled an entirely new gear. Hughes won the Norris Trophy just last year but looks to have hit another level entirely as a two-way driver this season. His pair with Hronek gives Vancouver one of the most dominant defense pairings in the league, and Hughes has emerged as one of the most impactful players in hockey, providing the Canucks with the sort of edge that has spotted them a significant margin for error in the early going.
For all that the Canucks’ machinery has sputtered and whizzed in the early going, it’s also been apparent that their engine has more horsepower than it has in over a decade.
Vancouver is generating quality looks at an above-average rate at five-on-five and is far less reliant on unsustainable forms of goal scoring — deflections and unscreened rush wrist shots, in particular — than last season. This is a team that, while there’s work still to do, has the look and feel of a club that might genuinely be able to find answers offensively when the chips are down against the toughest opposition in the biggest games of the year come springtime, as opposed to being a popgun club reliant on solid defense and gutsy, improbable comebacks alone.
It’s been a while since Vancouver hockey fans had a really good team to root for, and it’s easy to forget this is sometimes what it looks like at the NHL level.
Sometimes the individual sequences, the micro parts of the game, aren’t sharp. There are injuries, new faces to integrate and some possible evaluative missteps to work through. The team’s defensive consistency and overall structural play have only been fine, in sharp comparison with the lockdown defensive identity it found over the balance of last season.
In some ways, however, when a team can play sloppy, inconsistent hockey and still get excellent results, as Vancouver has, that’s more telling.
It’s not as easy to see. It might not be as satisfying to watch in the here and now, either. The truth, however, is that a team that gets results when it’s running into the wind is usually poised to go on a tear when it finds that the wind is suddenly at its back. And over a long 82-game season, the wind always shifts eventually.
More than anything, that’s what this Canucks team feels like to me through 10 games. There may be small stuff to sweat, but big picture, this looks like a team with the ability to be genuinely formidable. A club with the sort of ceiling to better what it accomplished last season.
This isn’t to downplay that there are meaningful areas to sort out — their rush defense has sagged over the past week and the power play looked better on Saturday, but has mostly been feckless — but if the Canucks can get these sorts of results when they’re not playing great hockey, it should also be exciting to think about what it might look like if and when they shift into gear going forward.
(Photo of Pius Suter celebrating after scoring the game-winning goal against the Sharks: Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)
