It's game day!
With three days of training camp in the books, the Vancouver Canucks will now face some real competition. They'll serve as the first-ever opponents for the Seattle Kraken on Sunday in Spokane, then host the Calgary Flames in Abbotsford on Monday.
Puck drop for Sunday's game is 6 p.m., while Monday's is at 7. Sounds like you'll need the NHL Live package to see the game in Spokane, while the Abbotsford game is set to be streamed on Canucks.com. Brendan Batchelor will also have the call for both games on Sportsnet 650.
After Sunday's training session, Travis Green said he hadn't made up his mind about what his rosters would look like for both games, although he did say that he expected that he'd ice more of a veteran lineup in Abbotsford on Monday, to give the paying fans on hand some big names to see.
For a quick primer on the Kraken, including a look at their uniforms and some line combinations from Saturday's scrimmage,
click here. Joonas Donskoi, Ryan Donato and Brandon Tanev were named the three stars of scrimmage.
Here's how Seattle is rolling out at Sunday's morning skate. Don't look now, but Jared McCann is centring the first line. And since the Kraken are more interested in setting their NHL group than in looking at prospects right now, that group looks pretty formidable to me.
Are we going to start the season with a double shot of Tanevs? Chris is the face of the pop-up ad on the Flames' website, so it's possible — although Calgary is hosting Edmonton on Sunday night, so the Flames will probably refrain from sending some veterans to Abbotsford.
Darryl Sutter's group has already gone through its first cuts, slicing 11 players from the roster, but still has a whopping
51 players left in camp — 29 forwards, 17 defensemen and five goalies.
The Canucks started with
54 players, but that number includes the absent Justin Bailey, Carson Focht, Tyler Motte, Elias Pettersson, Brandon Sutter, Guillaume Brisebois, Travis Hamonic and Quinn Hughes.
I spotted Focht, Motte and Brisebois doing some work on the ice after the main sessions on Saturday. Petey and Quinn, I'm sure you saw, spent their Saturday taking in the University of Michigan football game — a 20-13 win over Rutgers.
No updates on them — or on the status of Hamonic and Sutter, whose absences both carry a bit of an air of mystery. It's hard not to feel a bit of anxiety about all four situations, but I've heard players and coaches say often enough that you have to concentrate on who's here, rather than who isn't.
Another player who I expect will be sidelined long term is defense prospect Brady Keeper, who suffered what appeared to be a terrible leg injury during a drill on Saturday afternoon. Heading for the front of the net, he suddenly went down, screaming, and dropped a huge F-bomb before having his left leg immobilized by the Canucks training staff and being stretchered off the ice.
One of the Canucks' many depth signings on the first day of free agency, Keeper got one of the juicier contracts that day — a two-year, one-way deal that pays him $750,000 this season and $775,000 the next. The undrafted 25-year-old played two seasons at Maine before being signed as a college free agent by the Florida Panthers in 2019.
If there's a silver lining out of all this, perhaps it's the fact that the two-year deal should give him the security to get another look once he's recovered. Fingers crossed that it looked worse than it was!
If you want to get a look at the Canucks' Saturday scrimmage, this is a very good highlight package that catches many of the 'Wow' moments.
By all accounts, the pace was higher on Saturday than during Friday's scrimmage — and the crowd inside Abbotsford Centre grew, day-by-day, as well.
As far as individual standouts go — I'm already acclimated to the idea of Vasily Podkolzin as a legitimate NHLer. And in just a week, Danila Klimovich has made big moves up my personal depth chart. On the first day of rookie camp last Friday, I thought it would be too big of a mountain for him to climb, just to be able to hold his own in a foreign North American environment.
But he's doing it. He's in the flow and made some confident plays during Saturday's scrimmage. It must be helping him enormously to have Podkolzin beside him, a guide who can help him through the on and off-ice challenges of this transition and who's the type of person that wants to look after others. I bet their talks over the last week have made a huge difference. And yes, I do think it'll be interesting to see if the Canucks decide to keep the 18-year-old Belarusian in Abbotsford this season, rather than shipping him off to the QMJHL.
Elsewhere — the college kids, Jack Rathbone and Will Lockwood, have both been playing at the high end of what's expected for them. Nils Hoglander looks like he's ready to build off what was a solid rookie season — and as Brock Boeser joked on Saturday, he's now acclimated enough that he doesn't mess up practice drills anymore. Jonah Gadjovich looks leaner and faster, but still has his mean streak and his nose for the net.
If there's one guy who's in the doghouse — yep, it's Olli Juolevi.
Travis Green isn't usually keen to publicly criticize his players, but he had some pretty harsh words for the 23-year-old Finn on Saturday, when asked about his poor performance in Thursday's conditioning skate and the roster battle he's in against Rathbone and Brad Hunt.
"I don't think he did himself any favors, that's for sure," Green said. "I mean, all three of them know there's a there's a battle going on for that spot. And he's been through (the skate) before.
"I would have expected him to do better than he did in the skate. The guys that have done it before, they're fine doing it. It's usually a little harder on guys that haven't done it before."
At the other end of the spectrum, wily veteran Luke Schenn did just fine in the skate, even though he's not known for being the fleetest of foot.
"That was a that was a really tough skate test," he said "I've done different sorts of testing, obviously, throughout my career. That was definitely at the top in terms of, you know, putting your body through that stress. We had, like, probably close to a two-hour practice and then that skate. So it's tough to replicate that.
"When it comes down to it, you just tell yourself it's mind over matter. That's kind of what I tried to tell myself here. No matter how you approach it, your body's not gonna feel great at that time. So it's just mentally, it's what you try to tell yourself. Just grind and enjoy the work."
Schenn, of course, also had the shortest offseason of anybody at Canucks camp. Going through his second-straight Stanley Cup run with the Tampa Bay Lightning, he played his last game on June 23 — Game 6 against the New York Islanders in the Stanley Cup Semifinal — then stayed ready as a Black Ace until the Lightning closed out the Montreal Canadiens on July 7.
It hasn't even been a year since he won his first cup with Tampa Bay. Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final in the bubble was on Sept. 28, 2020.
With such a short offseason, Schenn said he basically kept skating this summer when he returned to his offseason home in Kelowna, instead of taking his usual break.
"We got back in late July, so it was a quick turnaround," he said. "I was probably back for about five or six weeks total, so I almost tried to combine the two seasons.
"You typically have a few months off and you're able take a little time off and you recover that way. But I felt like, with such a short turnaround, I thought combining it in terms of skating, not really getting off the ice and not taking on a super heavy workload in terms of off-ice, but more focused on keeping fit on the ice, just to kind of keep it going.
"Typically, guys start skating in August anyways, so I didn't want to take two or three weeks off and to try to get going late August. I just wanted to almost combine it, and keep it rolling."
Early impression: Good call.
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
Join the Discussion:
»