You might already be aware of this, but the 2015-16 Canucks are not very good. They are a mess in a lot of positions (goaltending notwithstanding), but their defence is easily the weakest link of all.

For much of this season, fans have questioned whether goals for or goals against have been the bigger issue (they’re been near the league’s worst in both). The two may be more connected than they appear to be on the surface, and the numbers are demonstrating that both problems begin on the Canucks’ back end.

Canucks defencemen have scored an abysmal 21 goals this season, which is the second lowest total in the NHL this year. Six of those have come from Alex Edler, and five from Matt Bartkowski (and each has been surprising). Chris Tanev has four goals, Dan Hamhuis has three, Luca Sbisa has two, and Ben Hutton, as impressive as he’s been this season, has but one solitary goal. Nikita Tryamkin, Andrey Pedan, and power play specialist Yannick Weber (who led Canucks defencemen last season in goals with 11) have combined for zero goals.

It’s often said that good defence leads to good offence, and although it’s easy to throw that line away as an old school cliche, the reality is that it holds plenty of merit. The vast majority of offensive opportunities, especially at even strength, at some point run through a team’s defencemen.

On rush goals, that involves defencemen retrieving the puck from their own zone and make good, crisp passes to available forwards, kick starting a breakout that leads to forays into the offensive zone. The inability perform this properly leads to a myriad of problems, ranging from blatant defensive zone turnovers to the less flagrant (but still problematic) glass-and-out clears that relinquish possession and allow the opponent to regroup and enter the defensive zone as a unit. The 2015-16 Canucks are chock full of defencemen that commit both of these acts on a regular basis.

On goals that follow offensive zone possession, defencemen at the blue line are used to stretch out the opponent’s defensive structure as well as change angles and get pucks through crowds for screened shots. They require blueliners who are fleet of foot and sharp of mind that can make intelligent plays, rather than swat pucks into crowded areas or shin pads, leading to loss of possession. Too few Vancouver defencemen are good at this either. Not to mention that retrievals and breakouts are necessary to achieve offensive zone possession more often than not anyways.

As a result of being largely inefficient in most offensive areas of the game, the Canucks defencemen do not score very more goals, nor do they gain very many points. The 2015-16 Canucks defencemen are astoundingly bad in terms of generating offence, whether compared against the rest of the NHL, or previous iterations of themselves.

To illustrate this, I looked back 20 years and tallied the number of points that each NHL team has gotten from their defence group:

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The Canucks defencemen are among the lowest scoring in the NHL this season, with only Edmonton, New Jersey, and Winnipeg’s blueliners piling up less points. These are not teams that you generally want to be close to in offensive categories if you’re intending to have any sort of success.

Looking horizontally across the chart, you can also see that this season is about as bad as it gets for Vancouver’s defensive production over the past 20 years. With 102 points from defencemen in 79 games, only the lockout shortened season in 2012-13 saw Canucks’ defenders put up fewer points (and of course that wouldn’t be the case if we pro-rated that season). This season’s defencemen need 12 more points in the final three games just to match last season’s total, which is the second lowest full season total of the sample.

Notice that it’s only been four seasons since the Canucks had one of the league’s most productive bluelines. They were also particularly productive area during the height of the West Coast Express era – an underrated strength of that period.

Here we can see how the Canucks have fared against the league average over the selected time period:

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With the exception of just a couple of seasons, the Canucks have typically been an above average team in terms of production from defencemen. The majority of the Mike Keenan years were above average, and the John Tortorella season fell just short. The two Willie Desjardins seasons are among the worst the Canucks have had to offer in the last couple of decades.

Things could still be worse though. So let’s look at goals, rather than points, where things will in fact get worse.

This chart, which shows goals from defencemen for each team since the 1996-97 season, paints an even bleaker picture. With 21 goals from defencemen this season, the Canucks are tied with Winnipeg and Columbus for second worst, just one goal up on New Jersey.

The dichotomy continues with the Canucks’ recent history. The Canucks led the NHL in goals from the blueline in both 2009-10 and 2010-11 (which we’ll affectionately term “The Ehrhoff Years”), a feat they also accomplished three times in the late 1990’s to mid 2000’s. Last season though, they were tied for dead last – on a team that made the playoffs no less.

This chart will further demonstrate the relationship of their goal scoring compared to that of the NHL’s:

Even more so here, we can see that below average production from defencemen is unfamiliar territory for the Canucks. It’s been so devastatingly bad the last two seasons that one has no choice but to wonder when Willie Desjardins system has something to do with it. Heck, even Keenan’s 1998-99 team that got 58 points and landed Vancouver the Sedins had defensive production going for it.

The last two season represent the lowest percentage of goals from defencemen that the Canucks have seen in at least 20 years.

For whatever reason, the Canucks are getting an unprecedented lack of goals from their defencemen. There exists the possibility that player acquisition is to blame, (if you’re heart is truly set on blaming Jim Benning), though you might expect forward scoring to drop at a similar rate – but this hasn’t been the case.

This seems to extend beyond just goals, as delving into shot data over the past near-decade indicates that Canucks defencemen are getting less shots on net, and scoring on a lower percentage of the ones that get through.

This mass of charts and graphs all serve to indicate that the Canucks defence group is not very good. While they’ve been ravaged by injury this season, they weren’t particularly good last season either. For me, the evidence seems to be mounting that this is indicative of some sort of systems issue. Whether or not this can be tied Willie Desjardins’ systems is a topic for future discussion, but it is certainly a topic that should be broached.

The fact that player personnel is simply not good enough is certainly a contributing factor, though I don’t know if it explains the full story. Those Canuck teams on the late 90’s were also pretty barren, but still managed to put up fairly decent numbers.

The most likely answer is that it’s probably a combination of the two. There will be some changes coming to the defence group next season, including full seasons of Nikita Tryamkin and Andrey Pedan, the introduction of offensive defenceman Philip Larsen, and the presumed departures of Dan Hamhuis and (hopefully) Matt Bartkowski.

Whether these changes are able to rejuvenate scoring from the back end remains to be seen, though at this point it is certainly hard to get one’s hopes up. Ideally, with less injury impact, little-to-no ice time for Bartkowski and Alex Biega, and maybe a free agent signing, the ability of the defence group to transition the puck up ice and attack the opposing net should improve on the whole, even with the loss of Hamhuis.

And if it doesn’t, we may be looking at a deeper issue and a more difficult fix. But hey, maybe this is the one bright side to falling further out of the lottery picture – we can get back to fantasizing about those high end defencemen available in the 4-to-10 region.





