Canucks 2024 offseason moves: Where are they better? Where are they worse?

The Vancouver Canucks followed up their dream 2023-24 campaign — a season that saw them rack up 50 regular-season wins and advance to the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs — with an active, sensible offseason designed to consolidate their gains.

The proof will obviously require the team to perform when the puck drops in October, but it certainly seems like Canucks hockey operations successfully put together their second consecutive effective offseason in a row. Canucks fans could get used to this.

With limited drama, Canucks management was able to proactively lock up its core players, handing out nearly $8 million in raises to pending restricted free agents Elias Pettersson and Filip Hronek well before the end of the league year.

The Canucks then retained several of their key expiring free agents — Tyler Myers, Dakota Joshua and Teddy Blueger among them — on relatively conservative deals, generally below market value. It was good, tidy work, even though Elias Lindholm and Nikita Zadorov both netted big, long-term deals from the Boston Bruins and departed as unrestricted free agents.

Reallocating cap space from the centre-ice position and the blue line to the wings, Vancouver signed a marquee free agent in Jake DeBrusk during the free-agent frenzy. The Canucks then went about filling out their roster with a quartet of moves for depth wingers and defenders — Danton Heinen, Kiefer Sherwood, Derek Forbort and Vincent Desharnais — all of which brought in useful glue-guy-type players on one- or two-year deals with cap hits ranging from $1.5 to $2.25 million.

Given the size of the raises Hronek and Pettersson were able to demand, it would’ve been an accomplishment for Canucks management to merely create a roster that was as good as the 50-win team that took the Edmonton Oilers to the brink in the playoffs this past spring.

Instead, with genuine ingenuity and discipline, the club found a way to improve itself this summer, at least on paper.

Now that the Canucks have accomplished the bulk of their most pressing offseason work — there remains an Arturs Silovs contract to negotiate, and they have some cap and long-term injured reserve flexibility to spend between now and the 2025 trade deadline — let’s get into the nitty-gritty of where and how the Canucks have improved their roster, and by how much, using Dom Luszczyszyn’s Net Rating model.

Big picture: +2 Net Rating

The model views the Canucks lineup as modestly improved after the team’s spree of summer activity.

Importantly, however, the key here is that the Canucks managed to at least maintain the quality of their squad from last season and were able to do so around a prime-aged core, even as that core got more expensive year over year.

Because the Canucks’ most important players — J.T. Miller, Quinn Hughes, Pettersson, Hronek, Thatcher Demko – are in their mid-20s or, in Miller’s case, early 30s, the model isn’t projecting any of those players to take any sort of meaningful step back as a result of aging at this point in time. That’s not something the model thinks about most of the other top Western Conference teams, particularly the other giants in the Pacific Division, the Oilers and Vegas Golden Knights, both of whom have at least one (or more) core pieces that are projected to be less effective going forward than they have been previously.

That factor is crucial to note. We’ll have more time to get into this later this summer and as the 2024-25 season approaches, but even beyond the moves Canucks management made this offseason, what really matters are the moves made to secure the long-term future of a core of prime-aged players over the past six months (the Pettersson and Hronek extensions in particular).

This correlation of forces has significantly strengthened the club’s relative position among the Western Conference hierarchy, even if the model only views the Canucks as a team that modestly improved this summer.

Now before we proceed to the nuts and bolts analysis of where the Canucks are specifically improved, let’s get into the weeds with some key qualifiers and the methodology behind this exercise.

First off, the big-picture goal isn’t to compare last season’s Canucks to the roster they’re set to ice at the outset of the 2024-25 campaign. What we’re trying to do here is hone in on how much the true talent level of this Canucks roster has improved as a result of the decisions made and the work completed by Canucks hockey operations leadership so far this offseason.

Because of this approach, we’re not going to project any changes in the effectiveness of various players due to aging, improvement or injury status. There’s been no significant ice time adjustments in the data, and age-related vacillations in projected value are already baked into the numbers you’ll see in the “Before” and “After” images that will make up the bulk of our analysis.

Lastly, and crucially, as we always note at length whenever we lean heavily on the Net Rating model (or its precursor Game Score Value Aadded) in conducting this type of exercise, a model is simply one tool — and a blunt instrument at that.

I’ve long since heavily weighted the outputs of Luszczyszyn’s model given it has a lengthy track record outperforming all other publicly available projection systems and, usually, the betting markets as well. And it’s worth noting the model forecast the Canucks as more likely to make the playoffs than not at the outset of this previous season (even as the team was priced at +120 to qualify for the playoffs by Las Vegas heading into the season).

All of that said, Vancouver’s performance next season and ability to improve on the Pacific Division-winning campaign will be shaped by a myriad of factors well outside of what a model can anticipate and account for. Injuries, team-level buy-in, vibes, conversion rates and team chemistry will shape the team’s performance this upcoming season, even if they’re not explicitly weighted and accounted for in this analysis.

Hockey is a human game, and we would never suggest that an NHL team should ever base their decision-making on the outputs from a single model. That noted, an industry-leading model like this one can still help us unpack and understand what the Canucks have accomplished so far this offseason and what it might mean for the balance of this summer and the campaign upcoming.

With those qualifiers and objectives noted in full, let’s proceed.

Here’s what the Canucks roster would look like this upcoming season if the club had simply run it all back without making a single change:

And here’s what Vancouver’s roster looks like following a busy offseason marked by key departures, big raises for significant members of the core and a handful of incoming unrestricted free agents:

To summarize the primary findings: You’ll notice the Canucks sacrificed a bit of quality down the middle of their forward ranks and in terms of their blue-line depth this summer, but significantly bolstered their quality on the wings — where the club was seriously lacking relative to the NHL’s best teams this past season.

Up front, the additions of DeBrusk, Heinen and Sherwood are regarded by the model as providing a modest upgrade on what was lost in Lindholm, Ilya Mikheyev and Sam Lafferty moving on in free agency.

On the back end, meanwhile, the model views Vancouver’s downgraded third pair as a subtle upgrade in terms of overall defensive utility. Zadorov and Ian Cole will be missed relative to their replacements in Forbort and Desharnais, as they brought slightly more offensive utility than what the Canucks can expect from their third pair this season.

As a result of the full picture of what the Canucks added in comparison with what they lost, the model sees Vancouver as having improved modestly as a team, largely because their defensive game projects to be even better than it was last season. Offensively, the model views the Canucks as having managed to tread water overall with their offseason moves.

Offence: Net Rating unchanged

What’s most counterintuitive about this analysis is that the model sees the primary Canucks swap up front — Lindholm out, and DeBrusk in — as one that bolsters the lineup’s defensive talent level.

Now this isn’t a perfect apples-to-apple comparison given the premium value of a reliable two-way centreman in comparison to that of a top-six winger. When you consider Lindholm’s overall scoring efficiency in Vancouver — especially during the postseason — and note that Vancouver was regularly outshot with Lindholm on the ice at five-on-five, these findings make somewhat more sense than it might initially seem.

If we view Heinen as a one-for-one Mikheyev replacement, that’s an area in which the Canucks project to get marginally better offensive impact in exchange for marginally less defensive impact. Sherwood is likewise rated by the model as a more productive fourth-line winger option than Lafferty.

And as noted previously, the Canucks lost some marginal offensive impact on the third pair, and all the blueliners with a positive offensive impact rating are expected to be concentrated on Vancouver’s top pair.

Vancouver was already top-heavy in terms of generating the bulk of its scoring opportunities with the Hughes-Hronek pair on the ice at five-on-five, and that could be even sharper this upcoming season.

Now, one final thing to note is that the Net Rating model struggles somewhat with pricing in regression. The inputs for Offensive Net Rating include the following:

A weighted combination of goals, primary assists, secondary assists, individual expected goals, faceoffs, penalties drawn, expected goals for impact at five-on-five, goals for impact at five-on-five, power-play goal impact and usage.

You’ll notice the model accounts for chances created regardless of result but doesn’t account or specifically attempt to correct for short-term bursts of shooting percentage-based efficiency. So where we might reasonably suggest a player who had a career year and shot 20 percent (or better) may struggle to repeat the same level of offensive impact next season, the model isn’t necessarily pricing that in with the same level of skepticism.

Globally speaking for the Canucks, then, we should probably note that they converted on their shots at a historic rate through much of 2023-24. That dizzying finishing rate from the first several months ultimately proved unsustainable and they often struggled to score down the stretch and into the postseason.

Vancouver was still able to finish the season as a top-10 team in terms of goals scored, but the rate at which it generated shots and scoring chances was closer to the bottom 10 than it was to the high end as the results made it seem.

Or to try and put it as simply as possible: If the Canucks haven’t materially improved their offensive attack this summer and instead have the same talent level offensively as last year, the results could fall off somewhat more significantly than the model or than Canucks fans are prepared for.

Unless the Canucks find clever ways of improving the power play or generating quality looks more consistently at five-on-five this upcoming season, it’s going to be very difficult to recreate the top-10 offensive season they managed last year — even if they’re every bit as dynamic offensively as they were last season.

Defence: +2 Net Rating

Driven largely by the model’s view of DeBrusk as a legitimate stud defensive driver up front and the somewhat upgraded defensive impact Forbort and Desharnais project to bring to the third pair, the model views Vancouver’s defensive talent as being upgraded by the club’s moves this summer.

It was evident that the Canucks prioritized fit in their summer moves.

Speed and penalty-killing ability on the wings was clearly prized, while size and penalty killing are the shared attributes of Vancouver’s newest additions on the back end.

Vancouver forged a very specific method for winning games last season. Leveraging defensive size both to make it difficult to generate scoring chances down low and to make it difficult to enter the zone (especially with speedy wingers cheating strong side in a neutral-zone wedge to attempt to force puck carriers back toward the wall) was perhaps the signature element of that overall identity.

Where Vancouver’s overall offensive profile was propped up by efficient finishing and its team-level goal production may prove to be somewhat ephemeral next season, the Canucks’ overall defensive impenetrability is bona fide and elite. And their offseason moves may have made their defensive solidity even more robust heading into next season.

It’s probably worth noting here, however, that Net Rating views their defensive group as lacking beyond the top pair. Another credible second-pair option is likely to be the primary need ahead of the 2025 trade deadline, according to how Net Rating views the Vancouver lineup.

Conclusion

On balance, Canucks management has managed to modestly improve its lineup this summer, which is no mean feat given the inflationary salary pressure that comes with locking up Pettersson and Hronek long-term with their third contracts.

The bulk of Vancouver’s improvement, according to the model, however, is defensive. Vancouver’s new additions — three sturdy two-way wingers with speed and two behemoth blueliners for the third pair — would appear to double down on what worked so well for the Canucks in the goal prevention department last season.

Combine Vancouver’s upgraded team-level defensive talent with the quality of its Vezina-level starting goaltender, and you’ve got a recipe for a team that’s going to be very difficult to break down on paper.

The Canucks, however, haven’t significantly upgraded the offensive true talent level of their roster. Given how percentage-driven some of their offensive performance was last season, they could be hard-pressed to manufacture as many goals this upcoming season as they did during the 2023-24 campaign, even if they haven’t taken a material step back as an offensive outfit.

There are still months to go before the season begins, but with the dog days of summer upon us, the Canucks look like a team that appears to have consolidated last season’s gains and are poised to be a threat to win the Pacific Division again next season.

If their one-shot scorers can continue to buoy the offensive attack and if they can add another top-four-calibre defender — ideally one with top-pair ability to serve as a legitimate No. 3 defenceman — this Canucks lineup could get to the level of an inner-circle contender by the time the 2025 playoffs roll around.

(Photo of Danton Heinen scoring on Thatcher Demko: Rich Gagnon / Getty Images)