Vancouver Canucks gameday: It's Dahlin day in the desert

The 29th-place Vancouver Canucks are visiting the 31st-place Arizona Coyotes in the ultimate struggle of bad vs. bad and the grand prize these contestants are playing for is Rasmus Dahlin.

Is general manager Jim Benning secretly on team tank? Was his pitch for a three year extension premised on the promise that he could deliver the greatest possible odds of landing the top pick in the 2018 entry draft? Is that why his first big decision was to lock up Erik Gudbranson instead of trading him for picks?

More absurd theories have been accepted by smarter people than me.

But alas, no. The Vancouver Canucks are languishing at the bottom of the standings in spite of Benning’s attempt to keep them competitive during the rebuild.

That’s the real tragedy here. Neither category of Canucks fans’ – the “win right now” or the “build a true contender” camp – are getting what they want. Benning has acquired and signed long term deals with players like Brandon Sutter, Loui Eriksson and now Gudbranson, on the premise that they will help the Vancouver Canucks right now.

They’ve done the opposite, as Vancouver has been a basement-dweller for three straight seasons.

But these moves have also slowed the pace of any possible rebuild, tying up both roster and cap space, and leaving the team with fewer trading chips to acquire the necessary picks and prospects to truly build for the future.

It’s a special flavour of mediocrity that is brewing in Vancouver and management sure hopes you like it, because they’ve made a real big batch.

But there is a tendency sometimes among fans of the Vancouver Canucks to lose sight of the woes of other franchises, selectively focusing on the disaster this is currently playing out on the lower mainland. A trip to the desert to play the Arizona Coyotes is a reminder that, as bad as things are in Van City, there are other bad teams. How fares their rebuild? Not necessarily much better than ours. Let’s take a look at the stories to follow on Sunday night.

Gud Heavens

There’s no way around it. Erik Gudbranson has been not good since he signed his 3-year, $12 million extension. No one should be surprised by this, because Gudbranson has, by most metrics, been the weakest regular defender for the Vancouver Canucks this season.

We heard that he’s struggled through injuries and hasn’t been himself. We heard him say that “no one knows” what his ceiling might be. We saw him put together a few decent games on a pairing with Alex Edler, a legitimate top-4 defender, and we were told that this could be the new “shutdown” pairing.

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And then, nine goals were scored against the Canucks and Gudbranson was on the ice for eight of them.

I’m no fan of plus/minus as a metric, but heaven alive, that is not a good look for a guy that almost everyone believed should be traded at the deadline.

Rumour has it the rebuilding Vancouver Canucks were offered a 2nd and 4th round picks for Guddy. Jim could have made off like a bandit knowing that he converted a massive sunk cost into two extra picks in a decent-looking draft year. After all, draft picks, Benning told us recently, are like gold.

Ahem. GOLD IS GOOD WE SHOULD GET SOME!

Nah. Why accept gold when you can sign a defender whose game belongs in the mid-00s. Really, Guddy would have probably been a genuinely good player in that era. I can picture him playing an important stay-at-home role on a team like the ’08 Red Wings.

But in the modern game, Guddy leaks shots and scoring chances. He is slow, especially in transition, and is often caught out of position or watching the wrong player. His boosters – including both the GM and head coach last week – insist that he is difficult to play against, clears the front of the net, stands up for his teammates. I’m not convinced that you should play $12 million for a tough guy, but even if you do, Gudbranson really hasn’t shown that he is that guy.

Goals are scored from the front of the net, when Guddy is on the ice. Forwards pounce on the opportunity to rush past him. And I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen him “step up” to protect a teammate.

Oh, and one last piece of bad news. There is almost no question that Gudbranson is going to get worse over the course of that three year deal. He is 26 now, and that is around the point at which most defenders start to trend downward.

If this move is part of a rebuild, it is… unorthodox.

A tale of two tailspins

But here I am, picking on the Canucks front office again. As Sportsnet 650 radio host Satiar Shah pointed out to me on Twitter Saturday, sometimes there is value in trying to find middle ground between the warring factions as Vancouver Canucks fans and media chew ourselves apart over the sputtering rebuild.

One thing we can all agree on is that this team isn’t winning many games and the future has to be the focus. And it’s not like Vancouver is the only franchise in that position. Several teams this year have found themselves in arguably worse messes – Edmonton and Montreal come to mind immediately – and no team has struggled worse than the Arizona Coyotes.

I have seen the Evil Magician Sat Meme and the last thing I want is to be haunted by that man.

So I’m going to try to channel the spirit of Sat’s response to me, and be as fair-minded as possible in comparing the Vancouver Canucks’ rebuild to that of the Coyotes.

The particular point we were discussing was regarding the Canucks’ mid-round draft choices. And you can certainly make the case that they have been better than the Coyotes’. There aren’t a lot of NHL players among the Coyotes’ mid-round picks over the past several years, and even some of their top picks have floundered.

To be sure, Arizona nailed it with Clayton Keller, but 2015 3rd overall pick Dylan Strome has yet to make a mark in the NHL. 2016’s 16th overall pick Jakob Chychrun has had more impact than Strome, but has been sidelined for much of this season with injury, so it’s tough to get a read on how that pick will look down the road.

The only other big name in Coyotes recent draft history is Max Domi, a kid with a good skill set but some questionable off-ice behaviours and a signficantly declining production rate. After collecting 52 points in his rookie season (2015-16) he has half that total at this point in 2017-18, and is said to be potential trade bait for Arizona.

In fact, there has been talk of the Vancouver Canucks trying to acquire him. I do not like that idea, but my colleague Chris Faber thinks it has some merit, as per the below.

We certainly can’t look at Arizona’s draft history and say we would rather have that, especially when it comes to the mid-round picks, where – credit where it is due – the current regime have made some strong selections. Nikita Tryamkin, Gustav Forsling, Adam Gaudette, Dmitry Zhukenov and William Lockwood were all 3-5 rounders and stand as solid choices.

Of course, the Canucks traded one of them and scared another off to Russia. Even still, full credit to Sat’s point: the Canucks have done reasonably well with the middle rounds.

Perhaps that makes it all the more frustrating that – so far – they haven’t traded any of their assets to get more picks.

On Feb 14, Jim Benning said that picks and prospects would be like gold this year, the implication being that they would be difficult to come by. He was setting up Canucks fans to not be too disappointed if he didn’t bring in a big haul.

The problem is, since he said that, 14 draft picks have been traded, 9 of them in the first three rounds.

It appears teams are, in fact, willing to trade picks. Here’s hoping that the Vancouver Canucks are willing to trade Thomas Vanek, Anders Nilsson, Michael Del Zotto, Chris Tanev and just about anyone else that might help them get their hands on those picks. Because – tipping my cap to Satiar Shah one last time here – they could very well do some good things with those picks.

Concerning Philip Holm

It’s been a long time coming for Philip Holm. When he signed a one-year deal with the Vancouver Canucks it was partly because he was given to believe that he had a real chance to crack this roster.

And why not? It’s not exactly a star-studded back end.

In fact, it’s been a bit of a disaster back there, beyond the always steady duo of Tanev and Edler. Troy Stecher continues to work hard and earn regular minutes, but after that it has been hit and miss. Gudbranson we have covered, Del Zotto hasn’t been a whole lot better, and Ben Hutton and Derrick Pouliot have been inconsistent.

Meanwhile, Philip Holm has adapted to the North American ice and style, and quietly put up a very strong season in Utica.

I watched Utica’s first two games against the Marlies in October and came away with the impression that the Canucks might have a hidden gem. Sure enough, he earned the trust of the coach with solid defensive play while putting up surprising offensive numbers, partly a result of getting a lot of power play time.

Could the Vancouver Canucks use a dependable bottom-4 defender who can QB a powerplay? Oh heck yes.

But Holm had to wait until late February to get his chance. He saw Alex Biega play ahead of him, even in games where seven defenders were dressed. One couldn’t help but wonder if/when frustration might set in, given the Canucks’ history with European players feeling that they don’t get a fair opportunity, including Nikita Tryamkin, Alex Burmistrov, and Anton Rodin (though in his case, he didn’t make any complaint, and his lack of opportunity had as much to do with bad injury luck as anything else).

Finally, on Friday night, Holm drew into the Canucks lineup and, despite the Canucks generally being outplayed by the stronger Vegas team, Holm put together a pretty good game. His defensive coverage was steady, he didn’t make any glaring mistakes, he jumped up offensively a few times, made some excellent passes, and delivered one notably large bodycheck.

All in all, Holm has earned the right to play a stretch of games here and prove that he deserves a longer stay in the Vancouver Canucks organization. If he were to pan out into a reliable bottom-4 defender, it would be a huge coup for the team, and there is nothing to lose by giving him that opportunity.

Oh my Dahlin

Nothing to lose. That’s really the name of the game here. These are two teams that have no playoff hopes now or in the immediate future. Everything should be aimed at the future, and while no NHL hockey team ever hopes to lose, you can’t blame a few fans for hoping an already-hopeless team goes full tank and wins the Rasmus Dahlin lottery.

Dahlin will almost-certainly be a franchise player, probably the next Erik Karlsson, and he sure would look good anchoring the Vancouver Canucks future. But Arizona is still 9 points back of the Canucks and there is also Buffalo in between them. So the Dahlin sweepstakes are still very much up for grabs.

Cynical fans will remind me that even if the Canucks finish 31st, the First Law of Canuck Luck states: “under no circumstances will the thing you want actually happen.” But in the current lottery system, finishing last still guarantees you a top-4 pick, and that should never be a bad thing.

Next: Canucks: This has not been a rebuilding year

So, yes, we have reached the awkward part of the season where you are never sure whether you should cheer for or against your own team. I propose a compromise: Canucks lose by one goal, a junky, contested goal where there should have been a goaltender interference penalty. Meanwhile Brock Boeser and Nikolay Goldobin both score, Holm gets two assists, Edler delivers a big bodycheck on Domi.

Coyotes get two points, Canucks slide into Rasmus’ DMs like: “Hi 😇”

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