Recently we reviewed the individual talent levels of forwards for the Vancouver Canucks and found the Canucks are fairly evenly distributed amongst 1st to 4th line talent with a slight bottom heavy edge. This makes sense as the Canucks are a middling possession team leaning towards the bottom of the pack.

To further our analysis of the offensive production of this team we use an idea that is blatantly stolen from our good friends at Jets Nation. We look at the offensive and possession values of the most common line combinations for the Canucks.

Continue past the jump to see how Canucks’ lines have been performing.

To perform this analysis first we grabbed the most common lines for the Canucks from Left Wing Lock. It does not specify, but I am guessing that line combinations must have a minimum of 50 minutes of TOI.

We entered these line combinations into Puckalytics.com’s Super WOWY (which is created by David Johnson of stats.hockeyanalysis.com fame) to see how the three players have been performing.

To quote from the similar piece at Jets Nation:

One must be careful when splitting variance and usage impacted data into even smaller samples, but trends can be interesting. … We care about Corsi percentage because as the sample expands Corsi

percentage and Goal percentage move towards the same value, but Corsi

percentage is far more stable or sustainable. In other words Corsi

percentage tends to predict future Goal percentage better than past Goal

percentage. It still is not perfect.

The results for the Canucks lines can be seen below with all Corsi values at 5v5.

Bo Horvat as Centre

The difference between having Ronalds Kenins on his wing against having Derek Dorsett is huge, causing a shot attempt increase of 12 percentage points so far this season – bigger than the average difference between a replacement level player and a premium possession driver. My hypothesis is that the success is a result of three things: (1) Bo Horvat’s development and improvement over the year, (2) the smaller sample size of time on ice hasn’t yet allowed for Kenins’ performance to regress, and (3) Ronalds Kenins is legitimately better than Derek Dorsett.

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Henrik Sedin as Centre

It’s no surprise that Henrik’s lines are the ones that perform the best of the team – he is the team’s #1 centre after all. It’s interesting to see that the winger they picked up in the off season, in Radim Vrbata, has played relatively worse than the other two combinations with Daniel and his brother in terms of puck possession. The Sedins continue to have success with Alex Burrows while Zack Kassian combined with the Sedins has produced the best results of all line combinations, even though it has been in a small sample.

Linden Vey as Centre

There is not much to say about Vey except that every line he is placed on performs the worst of all combinations. Given his AHL success, he’s not been performing as well as fans have hoped, although he has been improving his two-way play of late. His NHL future looks to be as a winger.

Nick Bonino as Centre

Bonino doesn’t appear to have any steady wingers, but regardless his performance is quite solid. His lines are in a tier below the Sedins which is what you would expect from your 2nd line centre, and he has provided the Canucks with very good value as he is making just $1.9 million this season.

Shawn Matthias as Centre

Shawn Matthias as a centre has performed only slightly better than Linden Vey as a centre. We know that Matthias has never been a possession driver in the middle, but rather a high scoring bottom six forward. Playing while attached to the hip with Brad Richardson will not help his possession values going forward, but he has seen some success in his short time with Radim Vrbata and Nick Bonino.

Summary

The Canucks are currently ranked 21st in Score-Adjusted Corsi in the league and it is no surprise as the team lacks high end possession driving forwards. We can see, using these tools, who is helping drive performance of other players and those who are hurting the team.

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What I was most surprised to see is that of the 10 line combinations only 1 is below 50% – I would have intuitively expected around half to be below 50%. I am not sure if that is a result of deployment, usage, small sample size of data, or errors in the code – something that is worth exploring.

With everything above in mind, it appears that the optimal deployment for the Canucks lineup in terms of Corsi maximization is as follows:

D. Sedin H. Sedin Z. Kassian S. Matthias N. Bonino R. Vrbata R. Kenins B. Horvat J. Hansen C. Higgins B. Richardson/L. Vey A. Burrows

Any line below the Sedins here could realistically be the second line on any given night, though the extreme success of the current “fourth” line gives them the edge right now. Horvat and Kenins will cool off going forward, but Chris Higgins and Daniel Sedin should start regressing to pick up the slack.

Looking forward to the playoffs, if the Canucks wish to have any success this year they are going to have to hope for a good match up. Currently, the Canucks would face Calgary who have been on a massive PDO ride all year. This is likely both teams’ best chance at getting out of the first round.

Looking even longer term forward, the Canucks need to find ways to supplement the top end of their forwards. Adding players like Sven Baertschi, along with their nice collection of young prospects will help, but it is certainly not enough. The teams with the deepest pools of young talent are not going to stop adding, so a Canucks team that still has big holes in their system will have their work cut out for them to keep up with the pack.





