Vancouver Canucks: Top 5 Player Battles to Watch in 2016-17

While the focus will lie on making the playoffs, there are several other battles to watch for the Vancouver Canucks.

The Vancouver Canucks made a few interesting trades over the past year that will inevitably influence the club’s future. Once a trade is made, club representatives tend to claim the focus lies on their own team and they don’t care what their former players do elsewhere. But is that something we can believe?

While it may be true that management and coaches want to just work with what they have, no matter what they could have had, fans and writers are usually different. We really, really care about what could have been, what management did wrong, and how other teams profit from those actions. Likewise, we get quite excited when a player was deemed too bad for the NHL, then traded to the Canucks, and eventually turned out to be extremely talented. That’s right, I’m talking about Sven Baertschi.

So, of course we will all be looking to Florida to see how Jared McCann turns out. We will all keep an eye on the Calgary Flames and Hunter Shinkaruk as well.

The same obviously applies to other roster decisions teams make. In the Canucks’ case, Jim Benning and Willie Desjardins will simply work with what they have. Meanwhile, fans and writers will keep checking how Dan Hamhuis is doing in Dallas and whether he should have been kept around, and whether Matthew Tkachuk would have been a better draft pick.

There are many team-internal battles to watch already, but these five league-wide battles will be just as interesting to watch.

Next: Gudbranson vs. McCann