It's been nice knowin' ya.
After a quick two-game visit to Rogers Arena over the weekend, the Vancouver Canucks are practicing at home this morning before they head out for another four road games over a span of seven nights.
The trip kicks off with the first game of the season against the Minnesota Wild on Wednesday—note the unusually early 4 p.m. PT start time for that game—followed by a return visit to Dallas on Friday, then a SoCal back-to-back against the Ducks and Kings next Monday and Tuesday, which will bring us into December.
The team will head out in better health than it has been in for awhile:
Sutter has already missed six games and will be out of the lineup for at least six more before his abdominal strain is reevaluated.
His absence has pushed Bo Horvat and Jared McCann into tougher assignments, with mixed results.
Horvat is minus-7 in his last five games and his Corsi numbers are also suffering according to
this article from Iain MacIntyre of the
Vancouver Sun. Willie Desjardins did manage to keep Horvat's ice time below 15 minutes in both weekend games—a rarity this season—and also kept Jared McCann below 13 minutes after he played a career high 14:07 last Wednesday in Winnipeg.
McCann is managing his assignments a bit better than Horvat but continues to struggle most nights in the faceoff circle and isn't generating the same scoring chances we saw early in the season. After scoring five times in his first nine games, McCann has added just one more goal in the next 11. His shooting percentage is still one of the best on the team at 17.1 percent—he just needs to get more chances!
On the bright side, Adam Cracknell is doing solid work in the fourth-line centre spot with Horvat and McCann moved up. All the penalties in Sunday's game against New Jersey limited him to less than 10 minutes of ice time for the first time all season—he was all the way up to 16:08 against Montreal last week.
When I think of games in Minnesota, I still think of how the Xcel Energy Center was Roberto Luongo's kryptonite but it might be a more general starting-goalie thing for Vancouver. Last year, the Canucks played just once in Minnesota—a 5-3 loss in February. Ryan Miller was pulled at the 7:59 mark of the second period after giving up five goals on 18 shots, then Eddie Lack shut the door the rest of the way.
It's not expected that new callup Andrey Pedan will step right into the lineup on the road trip.
Ben Kuzma thinks Pedan's physical presence will be more of an asset next week in the California games.
Kuzma reports that Utica Comets head coach Travis Green says Pedan "was probably 40-per-cent ready for the NHL last season, and is now about 75-80-per-cent prepared for the bigs."
Here's Green's scouting report on Pedan:
“He has taken some steps and in his good games, he’s a real solid defender because he closes quick and eliminates guys...He’s hard to play against and now it’s trying to find that consistency in his game. We’re pushing for him to be that kind of player all the time. That’s his ticket to the NHL.
“He’s such a good skater and has a hard shot, but sometimes he wants to do more than he needs to do. Now, it’s how do we get him to that final step? That’s a process.”
Canucks Sixth in Forbes NHL Valuation
To finish off today,
click here to link to Forbes' latest edition of NHL valuations.
The Canucks rank sixth in the league with a valuation of $745 million—a dip from last year's estimate of $800 million—and are Canada's third most valuable team.
In
this accompanying article, you'll see that the Leafs have been knocked out of top spot for the first time in a decade—partly as a result of the decline in the Canadian dollar but, since they got passed by Montreal as well as the New York Rangers, also due to the decline of their team while the Habs are on the upswing. The teflon Toronto market has taken a hit!
The dip for the Canucks would certainly suggest that the brand has not yet started to rebound from the decline it started to suffer in the wake of the Presidents' Trophy years. It's a process, as they say.
Back in October,
Jason Botchford reported that the Aquilini family had enlisted a company to get a valuation for the franchise, perhaps with an eye towards selling.
One thing that never gets mentioned when people talk about the value of the Canucks franchise—those three big rental towers that are being built on the corners of Rogers Arena. The first one has been open since the summer and the others are under construction. You can bet that the revenue stream that's generated by those high-end suites will help to spike the value of Rogers Arena—and that the Aquilinis will be looking to recoup those construction costs if and when they sell.
It's easy to say that a $745 million valuation is three times the estimated $250 million the family paid when it bought the team back in 2005 but there have also been some serious investments made along the way. When they were no longer able to maximize the revenue from their on-ice product, they did what people do in Vancouver—maximized the value of their land.
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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