It's Time to Stop Calling the Canucks' Defence a "Strength"
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A few months ago, The Guardian published a story on the "ugly friend effect": the phenomenon wherein a person's attractive features are augmented when in close proximity to people who aren't considered traditionally attractive. It's superficial, callous and unkind, but it's real, at least according to a recent study.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Canucks' 2016-17 defence corps. It's not pretty, but it looks better by comparison. You can thank Matt Bartkowski, and the relatively uninspiring play of the Canucks' forwards this season.
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The Canucks are in the bottom three of just about every conceivable metric designed to evaluate defensive play on the penalty kill, including shots, scoring chances, and expected goals.
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When your team's biggest offensive contributors at even-strength on the back end are Luca Sbisa and small samples of Larsen and Gudbranson, you may have a problem. With the exception of, hilariously, Sbisa, the Canucks largest minute-munchers on the back end rank among the league's worst at producing offence. The Canucks have no less than five defenders that appear in the bottom 50 in even-strength point production. The team's back end has also combined for just 13 goals, good for 28th in the NHL. (For context, Brent Burns has 22 all on his own [now 24!].)
When you take a look at the Canucks' shot metrics, it doesn't appear as though the defence is doing a particularly good job of moving the needle with or without the puck. In a vacuum, it's entirely acceptable that a player might concede a high number of shots against, or struggle to produce offence. If you take a look at the league's worst point producers at even strength, or at the league's worst shot suppressors, you'll often find a number of good players in that mix. The issue for the Canucks' defence is that they aren't good enough in any one area to make up for their significant flaws.
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At least they've got some promising young defenders, right?
Well, yes and no.
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While the strides Stecher, Tryamkin, and Hutton have taken since joining the organization are encouraging, they aren't really excelling in any one area relative to other defenders in their age group
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To put it another way, I think Chris Tanev and Alex Edler are the unsung heroes of the Canucks' lineup, but they still aren't enough to drag this team into respectability, and I also remain unconvinced that the Canucks have a defender on their roster that projects to be better than those two are.
Oh well. At least the reinforcements are coming, right?
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it's not a great sign when the prospect with the highest chance of success is also the one you've desperately been trying to trade for the better part of the last 18 months. Not one of the Canucks prospects on defence -- not even Juolevi -- is a sure thing. [...] Juolevi, as strong of a prospect as he is, hasn't really taken the step forward you'd expect from a top-5 pick.
absolutely scathing, true, and necessary given all the donks in this market.
like about the only thing they can hang their hat on is that some of these guys are young, so they could theoretically make a leap in development and become good players. but of course, all the dumbasses here forget that these guys aren't 18yo kids. Hutton turns 24 & Stecher 23 in April, and Tryamkin turns 23 later this fall. this age nonsense is the same thing people said about Sbisa forever,
oh he'll figure stuff out and improve linearly with age. same with Gudbranson who just turned 25. once you get that age and have played 300+ NHL games, you kinda are what you are.
ugh
