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
1. Erik Gudbranson vs. Jared McCann
In a shocking off-season trade, the Vancouver Canucks sent one of their top prospects to the Florida Panthers for defenseman Erik Gudbranson. Along with Jared McCann, the Panthers got a second and a fourth-round pick, and sent a fifth-rounder back to Vancouver. At the time, both Canucks and Panthers fans were angry at their respective GMs — but who really won this trade?
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The Panthers lost the No. 1 defenseman on the depth chart — at least by ice time — and future captain, and got an unproven prospect and a draft pick in return. It was therefore not surprising that Panthers fans were rather shocked about the deal.
From a Canucks fan’s point of view, however, it doesn’t look great either. McCann and Bo Horvat were supposed to be a terrific one-two punch down the middle for many years to come. Plus, the Canucks are trying to rebuild on the fly, so losing a blue-chip prospect and an early draft pick really didn’t sound good.
So who wins?
Florida later sent the second-round pick to Buffalo, which will make this trade even harder to evaluate. The obvious battle is McCann versus Gudbranson, plain and simple. It will be a while before we can declare a long-term winner, but if Gudbranson plays an important role on the Canucks blue line this season, it will be a little win for the Canucks already.
Next: Horvat vs. McCann
2. Bo Horvat vs Jared McCann
You see, this trade isn’t easily evaluated and it brought a bunch of different battles upon us. One of them is Bo Horvat versus Jared McCann, because they were both kind of designated for the same future roster spots.
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Both Horvat and McCann excel as two-way centers. They were both selected in the first round of their respective draft years, both went straight from junior to the NHL, and both have top-six potential. The big question was always whether one of them was good enough for a top-line role or whether the two of them as a one-two punch would be good enough to roll without a true first-line player.
Well, now it’s all up to Horvat.
Personally, I rather see top-line potential in McCann while Horvat is more of a second-line leader. Horvat is a future captain with a terrific two-way game, but McCann seems to have more scoring potential.
We won’t find out this season, but 2016-17 will be a first indication of what is to come. Horvat will get a chance to prove he is ready to be a second-line player while McCann still has to prove he can be a full-time NHL player. Can he score more than 18 points? Will he even start the season in the NHL? We are about to find out.
Next: Gudbranson vs. Hamhuis and McCann
3. Erik Gudbranson vs. Dan Hamhuis and Jared McCann
This is the last McCann-Gudbranson-related battle, I promise. But it might also be the one with the biggest impact on the upcoming season.
The Vancouver Canucks not only traded a center prospect for a defenseman, but they also let go of one of their best D-men, Dan Hamhuis. In a way, they swapped Gudbranson for Hamhuis and at this point, that doesn’t seem like a good swap.
4. Markus Granlund vs. Hunter Shinkaruk
Like Jared McCann, Hunter Shinkaruk was one of the Vancouver Canucks’ blue-chip forward prospects. Selected in the first round of the 2013 NHL draft, Shinkaruk is a highly skilled winger who used to be one of the most dangerous scorers in the Canucks organization. But as he was leading the AHL Utica Comets in scoring, the Canucks decided he probably wasn’t going to make the NHL.
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So, Vancouver dealt Shinkaruk to the Calgary Flames in late February, 2016. Instead of Shinkaruk, the Canucks wanted someone who was already in the NHL and was definitely going to stay there long-term. In other words, they traded a prospect winger with 30-goal potential for a bottom-line NHL center. Great.
In 17 games with Calgary’s AHL affiliate, the Stockton Heat, Shinkaruk had six goals and six assists for 12 points. That was enough to earn himself some NHL time late in the season, and Shinkaruk appeared in seven games with the Flames. In those seven games, he scored twice and added an assist in some very promising showings.
Meanwhile, Granlund recorded the same amount of goals and assists in 16 games. He certainly looks like someone who will stick around in the NHL, but he doesn’t look like a better player than Shinkaruk. Don’t be surprised to see Shinkaruk in the NHL full-time this season.
Therefore, this is definitely a battle to watch. The Canucks sent one of their most promising scorers to a division rival — which is probably never a good idea.
Next: Juolevi vs. Tkachuk
5. Olli Juolevi vs. Matthew Tkachuk
To round this out, we have a serious long-term battle that could be fun to watch for many years. The Canucks sent one of their most promising scorers, Hunter Shinkaruk, to the Calgary Flames in February, and followed that up by leaving another promising scorer for the Flames at the 2016 draft.
Most scouts agreed that the top-six players of the draft were forwards, namely Auston Matthews, Patrik Laine, Jesse Puljujarvi, Pierre-Luc Dubois, Matthew Tkachuk and Alexander Nylander. What followed behind that was more talented forwards as well as a few defensemen, including Olli Juolevi, Mikhail Sergachev and Jacob Chychrun. There was no consensus top D-man, nor were there many who would have picked a defenseman in the top five.
The Canucks did just that.
Canucks Nation was hoping Jim Benning could land forward Pierre-Luc Dubois. If that didn’t work out, which turned out to be the case, most were hoping for Tkachuk. Well, it became Juolevi, and we now have to live with that.
Next: Why Juolevi Was a Terrific Pick
Wait, live with that? Isn’t Juolevi a terrific prospect? He sure as hell is. The only issue is that the Flames won another highly talented scorer who might spend the majority of his career scoring goals against the Canucks.
It will be a while until both prospects play major roles in their respective organisations. However, the 2016-17 campaign could give us a first idea of who got the better player. If one of Tkachuk and Juolevi makes the NHL, that could be a first indication.