The Vancouver Canucks are in the middle of a weird, hard-to-evaluate season.
On the surface, Vancouver's 14-8-4 record is commendable given Thatcher Demko, J.T. Miller, Filip Hronek, Brock Boeser and Dakota Joshua have all missed games this season. It's a promising sign that the Canucks are still cruising at a comfortable 100-point pace even though many things have gone wrong. Barring an unforeseen catastrophe, we can all agree this is a good team that will make the playoffs.
The big debate, however, is what the Canucks can realistically accomplish in the postseason. Is playing through June and contending for the Stanley Cup a realistic goal or more of a pipe dream?
One interesting observation that's relevant to this conversation is that the Canucks' results are night and day based on the quality of their opponents. They've been pummelling bottom feeders but have gotten outclassed by opponents of real substance.
You'd naturally expect most teams to perform better against bottom feeders than top contenders, but the split between the Canucks' performance based on opponent quality is so stark that it warrants a closer examination.
Here are three thoughts on the Canucks' early issues against top teams.
Vancouver's poor results against playoff contenders are far from ideal, but do they merit big-picture concern? Or is it just a blip in the radar, especially given the club's injuries (more on that later)?
The goal is to figure out if the Canucks' early struggles against good teams are a sign they're less likely to go on a deep playoff run, so let's reverse engineer: How do franchises that succeed in the playoffs typically perform against good teams in the regular season?
To answer this, I looked at the teams that made the conference finals over the last two years and split their regular-season records based on opponent quality. The findings surprised me: Recent Stanley Cup contenders haven't always dominated against top teams in the regular season, especially at the start of the campaign.
The average team to make the conference finals over the last two seasons had a .567 points percentage (the equivalent of a 93-point pace over 82 games) against playoff teams in the regular season. That's a pretty good figure, but there are clear outliers and extra context to consider.
Edmonton reached Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final last season despite a mediocre 18-18-3 record against playoff teams in the regular season, with a commanding 31-10-2 record against non-playoff teams propping up their overall record last season.
The Stars had a decent record against playoff teams last season, but their start was a different story. They began 2-4-1 against playoff teams and 9-0-0 against non-playoff teams early in 2023-24.
The Florida Panthers reached the 2023 Stanley Cup Final despite a 16-21-5 record against playoff teams in the regular season.
Carolina won just three of its first 12 games against playoff teams in the 2022-23 regular season and yet it advanced to the 2023 conference finals.
It will be a red flag if the Canucks continue operating at a .333 points percentage against playoff-bound opponents for the entire season, but there's enough evidence above to prove a slow start against the league's top teams doesn't automatically mean you're a pretender.
There are probably four teams in the Western Conference that the majority of analysts and fans around the league would agree are bona fide Cup contenders: Dallas, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Vegas. Maybe you'd want to throw Minnesota or Colorado in that equation too, but let's stick to those four teams for now. Winnipeg is the only team out of those four Western contenders that has won more games than it's lost against "playoff-calibre" opponents so far in 2024-25.
"Playoff-calibre" opponents are defined as currently being in a playoff spot and having a greater than 50 percent chance of making it in according to Dom Luszczyszyn's model
Again, this surprised me and reaffirmed that while the Canucks' early issues against quality opponents are worth monitoring, it's not as big of a red flag as I originally expected it to be.
Every team goes through injuries/key player absences, but the Canucks have certainly been one of the unluckiest so far in 2024-25.
One way to quantify this is through Dom's model, which can calculate the estimated goal differential every team has lost due to injuries/absences (excluding healthy scratches). Some below-average NHL players have a negative estimated impact on a team's goal differential and missed time because of injury, which explains why some clubs have a value below zero.
Between Boeser, Hronek, Miller, Joshua, Derek Forbort and Vincent Desharnais, Vancouver ranks 12th in the league for goal differential lost due to games missed. Some teams have had it significantly worse when strictly looking at skater injuries.
The Islanders, for example, were missing all three of their left-side defencemen plus Mathew Barzal and Anthony Duclair when they played the Canucks in November. At one point, the Avalanche were missing six of their top-nine forwards at the same time -- Gabriel Landeskog, Valeri Nichushkin, Artturi Lehkonen, Jonathan Drouin, Ross Colton and Miles Wood.
When you add goalies into the equation, however, Demko's injury catapults the Canucks to No. 1 in the NHL for total goal differential lost due to games missed.
Most Canucks fans have baked the injury troubles into their assessment of the team's play so far, but it should be even more reassuring for the fan base to see it laid out like this.
The Canucks' lacklustre performance against top opponents isn't overly worrying because of the reasons mentioned earlier, but that doesn't mean they're bona fide Cup contenders by default either. Almost everybody who regularly watches Vancouver play can tell this team needs to reach a higher level to go toe-to-toe with the best teams in the NHL.
In my mind, there are three key factors to watch.
Firstly, the Canucks need Demko healthy and performing at the level of a top-10 goaltender. There's a reason Demko finished as a Vezina Trophy finalist last season -- he was often the Canucks' trump card in close games last year because elite goaltending is hard to find in the modern NHL. Demko's return to game action appears to be right around the corner, but that doesn't guarantee he'll stay healthy or perform at a high level.
Remember that there are no previously reported cases of a goaltender or hockey player ever sustaining the reported popliteus injury Demko is recovering from. We're in completely uncharted territory. Even if Demko manages to stay healthy for the entire regular season and playoffs, can he play like an elite puck-stopper after several months off?
Secondly, the Canucks need the best, most dominant versions of Elias Pettersson and Miller. Vancouver's top players, besides Quinn Hughes, have been outplayed in head-to-head games against top teams this season.
Tampa Bay's first line of Nikita Kucherov, Jake Guentzel and Brayden Point combined for four goals on Sunday night at various game states compared to none from Pettersson's line. Pettersson was without a point in his first five games against playoff-calibre opponents in October. He has 19 points in his last 14 games, so there's reason for cautious optimism, but he needs to sustain this recent form for the rest of the 2024-25 campaign.
Miller had arguably his worst game of the season during the Canucks' 7-3 blowout loss to the Oilers a month ago. He's also been out of the lineup for their recent losses to the Rangers, Wild and Lightning.
Vancouver's been too reliant on Hughes to drive the bus this season. Other core players will need to step up over the balance of the season and playoffs.
Thirdly, it's no secret that the Canucks desperately need to acquire a quality top-four defenceman.
Overall, I'm still in wait-and-see mode in evaluating the Canucks. It's going to be difficult to assess whether they have legitimate Cup-contender potential until closer to the deadline, when we have a better sense of whether Demko, Miller and Pettersson are operating at an elite level and what a healthier roster with Hronek's return looks like.
A lot will need to break right for Vancouver to go on a deep run this spring, but it'd be premature to write those chances off solely based on the team's early struggles against top teams.