At the beginning of last season, Canucks Nation snorted indignantly when
Kevin Allen of USA Today projected a last-place finish and 65 points for the 2016-17 incarnation of the team.
Thanks to a historically bad Colorado Avalanche club, the Canucks didn't finish last. And one could argue that the roster the team was icing after the trade deadline wasn't exactly designed to try to win games. The team was 2-13-0 for the last month of the season and finished 29th with 69 points.
Kevin Allen projected a record of 28-45-9. The Canucks managed to go 30-43-9. Eerily close.
The last time the Canucks were this bad was in 1998-99, when they went 23-47-12 for 58 points in the last season before the loser point was introduced. But change was coming—Mike Keenan was dismissed as head coach during the 1999 All-Star Break after leading the team to a 15-24-6 record. Marc Crawford went 8-23-6 the rest of the way but stayed with Vancouver for six more years. He left the Canucks after the 2005-06 season as the franchise leader in games coached (529, which was eventually surpassed by Alain Vigneault at 540) and tied with Pat Quinn as the most successful coach in team history (246-189-62 for an average of .554 points per game—also eventually surpassed by Vigneault who earned .632 points per game).
Is Travis Green the new Crawford? Not on the surface. When Crawford came to Vancouver, he was 37—nine years younger than Green is now—but he already had four years of NHL head coaching under his belt, including winning at Stanley Cup with the Colorado Avalanche in 1996. Green, of course, played till he was 37, so he got a later start in the coaching game. He doesn't have NHL experience behind the bench but his 970 games of NHL playing experience vastly exceeds the 176 games that Crawford played between 1981 and 1987.
Of course, the other big change that came for the Canucks was the drafting of the Sedins in 1999. But the twins were a lesson in patience—not only did they go back to Sweden for one year before even taking a crack at the NHL, they weren't exactly game-breakers when they broke in.
The twins started to tease their talent in the 2002 playoffs against the Detroit Red Wings, but didn't turn into gamebreakers until after the 2004-05 lockout. Henrik jumped from 42 points in 2003-04 to 75 in 2005-06 and Daniel went from 54 to 71.
Daniel scored 20 goals in his rookie year but the Canucks were led that season by the West Coast Express combo of Markus Naslund, 27, and Todd Bertuzzi and Brendan Morrison, both 25, as well as free-agent signing Andrew Cassels, who had joined he team as a 30-year-old in 1999-2000 to add depth up the middle.
The Canucks improved from 58 points in 1998-99 to 83 in Cassels' first season—still a team in transition, but one that was accumulating some good young assets before the Sedins were ready to take over the team. Naslund, of course, arrived in Vancouver in 1996 in one of the most lopsided trades in NHL history. Bertuzzi joined the team in 1998 as part of the package the team received for Trevor Linden. Morrison came to Vancouver in March of 2000 as the key player in the Alexander Mogilny trade.
On the blue line, Ed Jovanovski was the primary return in the deal that sent holdout Pavel Bure to Florida in January of 1999 and Mattias Ohlund was a 22-year-old who was on the cusp of turning into a top-pairing blueliner.
Do the Canucks have that level of talent on their current roster?
We'd need to see Bo Horvat, Sven Baertschi and Markus Granlund take big steps forward this season if they wanted to tease the possibility that they could emulate the West Coast Express career arc. In a perfect world, Brandon Sutter plays the role of Andrew Cassels and explodes for 62 points and Michael Del Zotto becomes the new Adrian Aucoin with his big point shot on the power play.
This year's offseason additions like Del Zotto, Gagner and Anders Nilsson slot into the voids that have been left by the departures of Alex Burrows, Jannik Hansen, Nikita Tryamkin and Ryan Miller.
On paper, the Canucks aren't any better than they were last season, but there are three wild cards in play that could boost the team's fortunes—or at least make them more fun to watch:
• Travis Green. His new approach should yield better results than what Willie Desjardins was able to tease out of his team over the last two years.
• The kids. Brock Boeser, Nikolay Goldobin, Jake Virtanen and Olli Juolevi were all first-round draft picks. If even two of those players can make the jump to become important contributors, that'll change the complexion of the team enormously.
• Less injuries. Check out this chart—since the 2009-10 season, the Canucks are the third-most injured team in the league, behind only Edmonton and Pittsburgh.
The Pens have some sort of superhuman ability to get past all the misfortune that falls on their team, but the Canucks have not been so lucky. Last season, this graph shows the Canucks with nearly 80 more man-games lost than the second most-injured team, Winnipeg.
My
schedule analysis for 2017-18 seems to indicate that the Canucks will get a bit of a break this year in terms of their travel miles and back-to-back games. If that translates into a healthier team, that could easily more wins—perhaps a gain of as much as 10 points from this factor alone.
Going into last season, Allen was right about the Canucks but he notably failed to anticipate the sudden rises of the Edmonton Oilers (103 points vs. 77 projected), Toronto Maple Leafs (95 points vs. 71 projected), Ottawa Senators (98 points vs. 74 projected) or Columbus Blue Jackets (108 points vs. 74 projected).
In today's NHL, team fortunes can turn around in a hurry. The Canucks will look different in 2017-18 and should be better, but it's a stretch to expect them to be the NHL's next Cinderella team.
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