We're one week away from the beginning of training camp, and the action is ramping up around the Vancouver Canucks.
First — we've got on-ice shots from Rogers Arena.
Nice to see the Podkolzin/Hoglander bromance carrying over to the ice after their outing a couple of days ago. And if you squint at Hogs' helmet, you'll see that he has switched over from No. 36 to No. 21 for this season — taking over the number from Loui Eriksson.
That change hasn't even been made yet on the Canucks'
roster page on their website. But the offseason additions are now listed.
And I don't remember — have we already discussed the fact that Jason Dickinson is taking over No. 18? It's the same number he wore in Dallas for the last two seasons so, much like Oliver Ekman-Larsson, that's a smooth transition for him.
Dickinson and Thatcher Demko have been repping the Canucks in Toronto this week, as the NHL's Player Media Tour resumes after a one-year hiatus.
It's nice to see Demko looking relaxed and embracing the spotlight as he steps into the No. 1 role this fall.
For the most part, we've seen him as a pretty introverted guy during his time in Vancouver. He generally doesn't give the media much, and during that podcast interview with Kevin Woodley of In Goal Magazine last week, he gave credit to his fiancee, Lexie Shaw, for establishing relationships with teammates' wives and girlfriends that helped him get to know other players better than he would have on his own.
Hot on the heels of that in-depth interview, Demko chatted with
Iain MacIntyre of Sportsnet. He put the spotlight on how Demko ended last season with four wins in his last six starts as the Canucks played out a string of meaningless games. In those wins, he posted a .931 save percentage while averaging 38.5 shots against as he battled to regain his form following the team's crushing Covid-19 outbreak.
“People talk about Thatcher’s March and how well he played,” goaltending coach Ian Clark told MacIntyre. “But what he did at the end of the season, after what he’d been through and what the team went through, was even more impressive to me. He stole games.”
That performance is even more remarkable when you consider that Demko only played one of Vancouver's first five games when the team got back into action after its Covid pause — because he was still quite sick, he said.
“I didn't really follow the typical COVID ... how COVID usually works," he told MacIntyre. "I was okay for about a week or 10 days (after testing positive), and then around like Day 11 or 12, it hit me really hard. And that was kind of the time when they were pushing us back on the ice. I was like: 'Hey, like this is kind of just getting to me now.'"
He's framing last year's challenges as a speed bump that should make the Canucks stronger going forward.
“I think the intangible things that you can pull from those situations are more important than maybe the entire season itself," he said. "Obviously, we want to be a playoff team every year and that ended up not being the case last year. But I feel like there were so many things that I could pull from that to help as an individual and the group. Guys were saying around the end of the year, if you can get through last season, you can pretty much get through anything.”
As for Dickinson, his words perhaps got a bit overblown when Sportsnet went with the headline "I've been warned to be ready," for
Luke Fox's article, speaking about Canucks fans.
Dickinson's comments were made to Elliotte Friedman and Jeff Marek for an upcoming episode of the '31 Thoughts' podcast — which I imagine will be '32 Thoughts' by the time it airs. And really, all he's doing is contrasting the Canucks' spot as Vancouver's No. 1 sports team with his time in Dallas, where the Cowboys consume so much Texan oxygen.
Here's the full quote from the article:
“I’ve been warned to be ready. That when the nights are bad, they’re bad. But when times are good, they’re really good.
“If the team wins or loses in the playoffs, then the city burns, right?
“That's how it goes. You know you're gonna get good fans, people that understand the game and truly, truly care about it. It's not just the average fan that's like, ‘Oh, [watching hockey] is something you can do on a given night.’ You got people that really care about the organization and where it's been — and it's not jumping from team to team. They've been with this team since the beginning.”
As Fox points out, Dickinson is a Toronto-area kid who played his junior hockey with the Guelph Storm, so he was under a bright spotlight before he went to Dallas. And as a player who, like Bo Horvat, was a first-round draft pick in 2013, the two of them had some battles during their junior days, often matched up against each other as the top centres on their respective OHL teams.
With respect to his role on the Canucks, “They told me to be flexible,” Dickinson said. “It’s something I’ve gotten used to. I made that my identity in Dallas. On a given night, I didn’t know where I was going to play.”
Fox points out that players don't usually send bottom-six forwards on the media tour. But I can't help thinking that things might have been different this year if Elias Pettersson and/or Quinn Hughes were already under contract.
Nothing new on that front — but none of the other top-end RFAs have been inked in the last couple of weeks, either.
CapFriendly shows 13 restricted free agents still unsigned as of Thursday morning. And that list also includes some intriguing mid-level players like Robert Thomas of St. Louis and Kailer Yamamoto of Edmonton in addition to the oft-discussed Kirill Kaprizov, Brady Tkachuk, Rasmus Dahlin and the Vancouver boys.
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