At the beginning of last season, the Vancouver Canucks’ president of hockey operations, Jim Rutherford, said, “We have a playoff team if everything goes right.”
As stirring speeches go, it may not have been all that inspiring, but it was prescient. Everything — or almost everything — went right for the 2023-24 Canucks and, sure enough, they made the playoffs. In fact, they did better than just make the playoffs; they won 50 games en route to finishing first in the Pacific Division.
By wins and points, it was the third-best season in franchise history, behind only their two Presidents’ Trophy wins in 2011 and 2012.
But Rutherford said something else at the beginning of last season: he and general manager Patrik Allvin want to build a team that can still succeed even when everything doesn’t go right.
"We want to get to a point that we have enough in our lineup that you can have a few things go wrong...and overcome that," said Rutherford.
If the 2024-25 season proved anything, it’s that they didn’t accomplish that goal.
In fairness, more than a few things went wrong for the Canucks this season, many of them out of their control. A lot more than a few things, really.
Let’s break it down.
A litany of injuries and illnesses
The Canucks were hit hard before the season even started.
It starts with Thatcher Demko, who had a bizarre injury to his popliteus muscle in his knee that wiped out his offseason training, as he had to spend a significant amount of time with doctors just trying to identify what was actually wrong and how to treat it.
That injury kept Demko out for the first two months of the season. The inability to properly prepare for the season was at least partially responsible for Demko’s subsequent injury problems once he returned, as he missed more time with back and groin injuries. After starting 51 games in 2023-24 and finishing as a runner-up for the Vezina Trophy, Demko played just 23 games this season.
Elias Pettersson noted that he had to train around the nagging knee injury that troubled him in the second half of last season. It seems likely that played a role in his struggles this season, plus he also missed 18 games to other injuries, with the latest coming just when the Canucks were desperately making one last push to make the playoffs.
Brock Boeser had to spend part of the offseason on blood thinners after a blood clot prematurely ended his 2024 playoffs. While he said it didn’t affect his offseason training too much, it’s something he had to account for. Fortunately, he still had a strong start to the season, putting up 6 goals and 11 points in his first 11 games.
And then Boeser took a dirty, unnecessary hit to the head from Tanner Jeannot that took him out of the lineup for three weeks with a concussion. Boeser still produced when he returned to the lineup, but it wasn’t at the same level as before the injury.
It seems somewhat flippant to include Dakota Joshua’s diagnosis of testicular cancer in this space, but it also can’t be avoided. Joshua’s successful surgery and subsequent recovery kept him out until mid-November. When he returned, he understandably took quite some time to get back up to speed and wasn’t able to be the same impactful player he was last season.
The injuries continued to add up throughout the season.
Filip Hronek missed 21 games with a shoulder injury, during which time he also had surgery for a lower-body injury. That’s a quarter of the season gone for half of the Canucks’ top defence pairing.
Filip Chytil, a key part of the return in the J.T. Miller trade, was blindsided by Jason Dickinson in a game against the Chicago Blackhawks in mid-March, giving him the fifth documented concussion of his professional career. That forced Chytil to miss the final 16 games of the regular season and, combined with Pettersson’s injury, left the Canucks without their top-two centres as the playoffs slipped out of their grasp.
Derek Forbort missed 17 games with a knee injury, a few more with the flu, and then had his orbital bone broken by a cheap shot in a largely meaningless game near the end of the season.
Even their depth wasn’t safe, as Noah Juulsen had season-ending hernia surgery in February.
Nils Höglander, Kiefer Sherwood, and Tyler Myers have also missed games with various ailments.
The most impactful injury for the Canucks was to Quinn Hughes, who played through a hand injury in January, but then suffered an oblique injury that took him out for nearly a month and forced him to miss the 4 Nations Face-Off.
Despite missing 15 games and playing a large chunk of the season far from 100 per cent, Hughes still led the Canucks in scoring with 76 points in 67 games. If he had stayed healthy, he might have been able to carry the injured Canucks into the playoffs on his own and likely would have added another Norris Trophy to his shelf, if not the Hart Trophy.
Putting the Canucks injury troubles into context
The Canucks were certainly hit hard by injuries this season but every team deals with injuries in one form or another. The question is, then, were the Canucks hit harder by injuries than other teams?
The answer is yes, with some caveats.
Not all injuries are created equal, with an injury to a star player obviously being more significant than one to a fourth-liner. NHL Injury Viz uses a statistic called Cap Hit of Injured Players (CHIP) to imperfectly account for the impact of injuries to stars by adding up the cap hits rather than just the man games lost when a player is out.
The Canucks were eighth in the NHL this season by CHIP, meaning just seven teams had a higher cap hit of injured players.
It should be noted, too, that some of the teams ahead of the Canucks on the CHIP chart include teams with players who were expected to miss the entire season, such as Logan Couture for the San Jose Sharks, Gabriel Landeskog for the Colorado Avalanche, Torey Krug for the St. Louis Blues, and Evander Kane for the Edmonton Oilers.
Those long-term injuries that wiped out an entire season account for the bulk of the CHIP totals for those teams, which feels significantly different than the unexpected twists and turns of the injuries faced by the Canucks. The Canucks didn’t have just one or two long-term injuries; they had multiple significant injuries stacked on top of each other that forced the team to dig deep into their depth.
So yes, the Canucks were more significantly impacted by injuries than most other teams in the NHL this past season.
That said, other teams that were hit hard by injuries handled them a lot better than the Canucks. The Dallas Stars, for instance, lost point-per-game forward Tyler Seguin a quarter of the way through the season and also had significant injuries to number one defenceman Miro Heiskanen and second-line winger Mason Marchment, as well as various other injuries along the way.
The Stars didn’t let it faze them, still finishing second in the Central Division behind the Winnipeg Jets with 106 points. How they’ll deal with an injury to leading scorer Jason Robertson on the eve of the playoffs, however, is another story.
It should also be noted that CHIP does not include players who miss games while on personal leave, so it doesn’t account for Derek Forbort taking a six-game leave of absence for the death of his father or the still-unexplained 10-game leave taken by J.T. Miller.
Speaking of…
Drama, whether manufactured or real
It’s hard to deny that the off-ice noise surrounding the Canucks this season affected their performance on the ice.
Much of the drama centred around the team’s two star centres, J.T. Miller and Elias Pettersson, with wild rumours flying around about the rift between the two. Whatever the veracity of those rumours, the Canucks simply did not do enough to either address or squash them, to the point that they became the story of the season.
Eventually, the Canucks’ president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford flat-out confirmed the rumoured rift, saying that the situation was intractable and one of them would likely have to be traded.
For what it’s worth, Miller has continued to say that the rift between himself and Pettersson has been “blown out of proportion,” but when the team’s president of hockey operations is inflating it full of air, it’s hard to deny.
Even if the rift itself wasn’t all it was made out to be by those in the national media, the drama that it created certainly was real. It’s drama that could have been avoided if the team performed better and won more games, but that becomes a chicken-and-the-egg situation. Which came first and caused the other: the drama or the poor performance?
Eventually, Miller was traded, with general manager Patrik Allvin stating that it wasn’t just “about two players.”
We might never get the full story behind Miller’s leave of absence and eventual departure from the team, but there’s no denying the impact it had on the Canucks’ season.
That wasn’t the only source of drama, of course. Another source was the way the team’s management talked about their star players.
Allvin stoked speculation about trading Elias Pettersson just when the off-ice drama was quieting to a dull roar, also calling out Miller and Brock Boeser at a time when the team’s defence simply could not get them the puck.
Then, at the trade deadline, Allvin bluntly stated, "If I told you what I was offered for Brock Boeser, I think I would have to run out of here because you would not believe me."
It was an undiplomatic explanation for why Boeser wasn’t traded, simultaneously saying that he was actively trying to trade Boeser but also that no other team around the league wanted him. There have been some subsequent reports that have called into question just how poor the offers were for Boeser, but that’s beside the point.
Some might think the comment was innocuous. But talking to Boeser after the trade deadline, it was clear that he was hurt by those comments, and he said it was something about which he needed to talk to Allvin.
On the other hand, the Canucks’ top forwards underperformed this season and arguably deserved to be called out.
Individual struggles on the ice
One of the main things that went wrong, of course, is that the Canucks simply didn’t play as well as they did last season. The Canucks elevated expectations last season and then fell well short of that high bar.
That obviously includes big names like Pettersson, Miller, and Boeser, who were miles away from their production in the previous season. Pettersson went from three-straight 30+ goal seasons to only scoring 15 goals in 64 games. Miller was better with 35 points in 40 games before he was traded but still a sharp drop down from 103 points last season, while Boeser went from 40 goals to just 25.
But there were other, smaller disappointments that also had a significant impact.
The Canucks were counting on Carson Soucy to play on the second pairing. Instead, he was disastrously bad, to the point that he was nearly unplayable, with some of the worst underlying numbers of any defenceman in the NHL.
That seemed to catch the Canucks off-guard, who didn’t really have a backup plan to shore up their defence. Eventually, they traded the first-round pick they got back in the Miller trade to acquire Marcus Pettersson. Along with the emergence of prospects like Elias “Junior” Pettersson, Victor Mancini, and Kirill Kudryavtsev, there’s reason to be optimistic about the team’s defence moving forward but it wasn’t enough to help them this season.
There was also the disappointing performance of Arturs Silovs, forcing the team to rely almost entirely on Kevin Lankinen for most of the season, as he played in 51 games, more than twice as many as he played last season as a backup with the Nashville Predators.
Silovs was coming off a strong performance in the playoffs for the Canucks, as he was forced into action when Thatcher Demko was injured. He was also just a year removed from being MVP for Latvia at the World Championships. There was at least a little bit of optimism that Silovs could fill in for Demko to start the season or at least be part of a solid tandem with Lankinen once he signed.
Instead, Silovs seriously struggled, giving up six goals in two of his first three starts. Tocchet was understandably reluctant to give him too many starts after that and, ultimately, Silovs won just two of his nine starts this season.
Silovs found his game again in the AHL after being sent down and played a major role in their recent 13-game winning streak, but his early-season issues in the NHL played a role in the Canucks getting off to a slow start.
Bad luck or systems failure?
Some of the performance of individual players was bad luck or, rather, luck that wasn’t quite as good as last season.
The Canucks had the league’s best 5-on-5 shooting percentage last season at 10.6%. That ability to finish made up for being 26th in the NHL in 5-on-5 shots on goal. When the offence dried up in the playoffs, however, Rick Tocchet pledged to play a faster, riskier game to score more goals in the 2024-25 season.
Instead, the Canucks were dead last in the NHL in 5-on-5 shots on goal and didn’t get the bounces to make up for it. Their 5-on-5 shoot percentage was still slightly above average at 9.3%, but that wasn’t enough to make up for the lack of shots.
With that in mind, our discussion of the Canucks’ poor performances this season also has to include the coaching staff, who weren’t able to get more out of the players and failed to get the team to play a system that took more risks and created more scoring chances.
Tocchet took ownership of that at various times during the season and did so again after their final game.
“You put your heart and soul in it, right?” said Tocchet. |The coaches, we worked really hard at it, and when you don't make the playoffs, you've got to look at yourself. That's what we're going to go through, is what we could have done better.
“Really, that's what I have to look at myself. And then you reflect, and you go from there, and then you make changes or positive reinforcements, or whatever you do. I think it's important that we reflect on it.”
Looking at the Canucks' record, they went 18-5-14 in one-goal games and 6-11-0 in two-goal games. All told, they won 24 games and lost 30 games that were decided by two goals or less. Does that come down to bad luck, coaching, or the performance of the players?
Whoever is to blame (and it's likely a combination of all three), it's yet another thing that went wrong this season.
Next season has to be better, right?
Let’s be clear: none of the above is an excuse. Some of the things that went wrong were within the Canucks’ control, at least to a certain extent, and they themselves said their goal was to create a team that could face and overcome obstacles.
Still, it’s hard to ignore just how much went wrong for the 2024-25 Canucks. They went through a lot this season and there’s an argument to be made that they’re better for having gone through those challenges.
“We dealt with a lot of stuff this year,” said Sherwood. “I think when adversity hits, you learn a lot of lessons…If anything, we know how to deal with it now. I know it didn’t manifest in playoffs this year, but sometimes you’ve got to take a step back to take two steps forward, and that’s what we’re going to do next year.”
On the other hand, the Canucks have already lost one key part of the core in J.T. Miller and are likely losing another in Brock Boeser in free agency, leaving just Quinn Hughes, Elias Pettersson, and Thatcher Demko.
Given the uncertainty surrounding the latter two, the Canucks’ management has a lot of work ahead of them to make sure that less goes wrong next season.
Did I forget something that went wrong this past season? Let me know in the comments below.
