



The Vancouver Canucks are in the midst of one of the worst seasons in their 45-year history, and while many are satisfied with the high draft pick that it will undoubtedly yield, others are looking for something to blame. So what about all those injuries?

The Canucks have spent large swaths of the season dealing with injuries to major parts of their lineup. How much are those injuries responsible for, and where could the Canucks be without them?

The Canucks weren’t a contending team to begin with, but whether they could compete for the playoffs is another story entirely. One thing we do know: the Canucks were not a deep enough team to survive a series of major injuries; they needed pretty much everything to go right to even have a shot at a wildcard spot.

Things haven’t on the injury front and high-draft pick aside the results have been catastrophic.

Games Lost and Impact

According to Man-Games Lost, a website that tracks sports injuries and the effect they have on their teams, the Canucks have felt the second highest impact in the NHL in terms of injuries to forwards and defencemen.

As the Y-axis alluded to, the Canucks are terrible – only the hated Toronto Maple Leafs are on par with them in terms of wins. Their number of man-games lost to injury is staggering in and of itself, but it’s missing context in the sense that it doesn’t account for the quality of the player’s lost.

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Going purely on games lost paints a misleading picture. Take Arizona for example, who has lost 294 man-games to injury (MGL), sixth-most in the league, and just above Vancouver, who comes in at seventh with 277 MGL. However, 74 of those games belong to Chris Pronger, who hasn’t played a game in four and a half years and is only on Arizona’s roster because of a hilarious cap-driven trade with Philadelphia last summer. Without Pronger’s games, Arizona would be down to 220, which would drop them to 15th.

Another 69 games belong to Joe Vitale, who’s played for six minutes this season. Boyd Gordon and Steve Downie, a pair of bottom six players, have missed 17 and 12 games respectively. Their most serious loss among skaters has been Martin Hanzal, who missed 13 games earlier in the year.

Because of oddities like these, ManGamesLost takes into account player usage to determine the impact losing a player would have on a team. The metric IIT-skater (Injury Impact to Team by Skaters) multiplies man games lost by average TOI and adjusted for individual and team games played, producing a number that takes usage into account.

By this measure, the Canucks are among those in the league most impacted by injury.

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The reason for Vancouver’s “impressive” numbers in this category is obvious: many of their big-minute players have missed large chunks of the season. As of Saturday, when these calculations were last updated, the Canucks had lost 22 games of Alex Edler (24.45 minutes/game), 10 games of Chris Tanev (21.88), and 24 games of Dan Hamhuis (21.22). That’s significant time lost for their top three defencemen, and their top forwards have had their struggles as well. Henrik Sedin has missed eight games, while averaging a team-high 18.37 minutes per game while healthy, while they’ve also lost 54 games from Brandon Sutter and 15 games from Jannik Hansen, who have averaged 17.98 and 16.32 minutes per game in the time they’ve managed to play.

It’s easy to see why Vancouver’s IIT-skater is so high, but once again there are issues with this measure. Namely, it doesn’t account for players who are improperly used. Players who are getting more ice time than they rightfully should be, or perhaps players who shouldn’t even be in the NHL at all, can skew a team’s numbers and make their injuries issues appear worse than they actually are.

For this issue, ManGamesLost created the IIT-cfrel stat, which uses a player’s CorsiFor Relative percentage (CFrel%) instead of average TOI in its calculation. The number represents the overall raw relative Corsi differential created by the missing man-games. The lower the number, the worse the differential of the missing players. In other words, a higher number would indicate that the missing players were more impactful in terms of possession numbers.

Using this metric, the Canucks flip to the opposite end of the scale:

Taken without context, this table would suggest that the Canucks have actually been blessed to lose the players they’ve lost for the time they’ve been gone, rather than cursed.

But again, context is vitally important.

Many of the players that have missed large chunks of time were suffering from poor possession stats this season, but that does not always necessarily mean that they had little worth to the team, or even that they were bad at all.

Consider the following table, which uses data from ManGamesLost and is sorted by IIT-cfrel:

As with the team chart, the IIT-cfrel column on the far right is the sum total of relative Corsi differentials created by amount of games lost due to injury based on the per game average while healthy. I’m sure there are no surprised faces at the bottom two names on the chart, Luca Sbisa and Brandon Prust, are generally considered to be dead weight in terms of possession play.

Move up the list however and questions begin to arise. Third last on the team, and IIT-cfrel of -86.57 is Alex Edler, the team’s topish defenceman. These numbers would indicate that the Canucks should be quite a bit better without Alex Edler and his -5.6 CFrel%. Each game, the team is out-attempted a little bit more while Edler is on the ice relative to when he isn’t on the ice, and over the course of the 22 games he has missed, that would add up to quite the imbalance in possession.

There are similar situations for players like Radim Vrbata (IIT-cfrel of -45.89), Ben Hutton (-42.46), Jannik Hansen (-21.53), and Sven Baertschi (-13.91), all of whom we’ve come to accept as good, useful players. Surely a team dressing Edler, Hutton, Vrbata, Hansen and Baertschi is better than a team without them?

The answer where the Canucks are concerned is of course an emphatic yes, and therein lies the issue: it all depends on who is replacing the missing players.

Injuries on Defence

It was apparent early in the season that the Canucks were going to have issues with depth, especially on defence. A combined 89 lost games between Edler, Tanev, Hamhuis and Sbisa has forced depth players to to play too much, too often.

One such example is Alex Biega, who the Canucks have been forced to play 45 times as a result of long term injuries. Alex Biega is a solid eighth defenceman – the first one you call up from the minors to step in and play bottom pairing minutes for a handful of games, like he did in 2014-15. Much of the fanbase (myself included) became infatuated with Biega’s tireless work ethic and aggressive style of play, features that had earned him the nickname “Bulldog” in Utica.

Once he became an everyday NHLer though, Biega became subjected to the same level of scrutiny applied to his NHL peers. As a regular fixture in the Canucks top six, he leaves a fair bit to be desired. His 46.0 per cent CorsiFor percentage (CF%) ranks 194th out of 232 NHL defencemen with at least 200 even strength minutes played this season, according to stats.hockeyanalysis.com. Even worse is his Goals For percentage (GF%) of 40.5 per cent, which ranks 210th among the same group of defencemen.

Players that routinely get buried in both shot attempts and goals should not be relied upon to carry a heavy load on your blueline, yet the Canucks have had to play him over 20 minutes per game a handful of times and over 18 minutes many other times. Among regular Canucks defencemen, only Yannick Weber and Matt Bartkowski get scored on at a higher rate per 60 minutes of 5-on-5 time.

Speaking of Bartkowski, he’s another player that is getting more minutes than he rightfully should be. I’ve written recently on how Bartkowski routinely drags each of his defence partners down, and the problem is as bad as ever. After being a frequent healthy scratch last year in Boston, Bartkowski has played in all but one game for the Canucks this season, and all year he has been making players around him look bad by dragging down their on-ice statistics.

Luca Sbisa presents a slightly different problem. After being a whipping boy for Canucks fans in his first season with the team, Sbisa has missed huge chunks of this season with injury. However, when healthy, his numbers have actually showed incremental improvements from last season. A potential reason for his improvement is the limitation of his minutes – Sbisa seems to maintain his focus better while playing smaller role.

Of course, injuries to key players force him to take on a larger role, which can in turn lead to more mistakes. The following chart demonstrates how Sbisa’s ice time and Corsi For percentage have somewhat of an inverse relationship.

Sbisa’s usefulness may in fact increase, but it is unlikely to do so if he is overtaxed by minutes and responsibilities that are beyond his ability to handle.

Finally, and this is the damning blow, the loss of major pieces forces the team to dress numerous under-qualified players at the same time, such as when rookies Andrey Pedan and Nikita Tryamkin and depth players Alex Biega and Matt Bartkowski were all in the same lineup while rookie Ben Hutton had to play well over 20 minutes a night 70 games into a season. That is a recipe for disaster.

Injuries at Forward

The situation at forward hasn’t been much better. Brandon Sutter was penciled in as the second line centre heading into training camp, and although he may have been oversold in that role, there is no doubt that his loss has put far too much strain on the only centres – especially Bo Horvat.

Horvat has struggled in his sophomore season in many ways, and although he has come around offensively, he is still being shredded defensively and lagging in all manner of underlying statistics. Heis possession statistics are consistently below the team average on a team that is consistently below the league average.

The Sutter injuries may have been the most debilitating occurrences for the Canucks this season, but Henrik Sedin’s injury is not far behind. While the captain has only missed eight games this season, he has played many more while hurt, including games in which he is unable to take faceoffs, or even unable to sit down on the bench between shifts. It’s been suspected for quite a while that the injury was to his back or hip, and it has affected him in plenty of ways.

Meanwhile, Daniel Sedin is struggling as well. It appears that he has his own back injury, having left a practice recently, but is managing to play through it. Combined with Henrik’s injury though, the Sedins have found themselves falling off a cliff in terms of production. It’s not hard to see where it went wrong for them.

Injuries to these central players, as well as others like Vrbata, Hansen, and Chris Higgins have forced the Canucks to give big minutes to fringe players like Linden Vey and Emerson Etem, as well as abandon their coddling of Jared McCann, who has looked severely over-matched down the stretch. Some games have involved piles of rookies playing at once, with Brendan Gaunce and Alex Grenier trying to showcase themselves on a team that can’t hold its head above water.

Conclusions

There is no doubt that the Canucks have been sunk in large part due to injuries this season. There is likely a bit of truth to the notion that they would have been in contention for a playoff spot if everyone had remained healthy. However, this isn’t a conclusion that should make the Canucks’ brass feel any better about it self – it just exposes other problems.

First, in order to stick in the wild card race, the Canucks would have needed everything to go right this season. This is a foolish notion. Not only do injuries happen to every team every season, but they seem to hit the Canucks extra hard each year. Perhaps it is a result of the travel associated with playing out of the Pacific Northwest, or maybe it’s just the curse of this organization. Whatever the case may be, relying on a lineup to remain healthy all year long is an ill-conceived plan.

Secondly, even with a fully healthy team, the roster is not good enough to do anything but compete for a final playoff spot, where they will be subsequently paired off with one of the conference’s powerhouses. I’m inclined to agree with the notion that playoff experience aids in the development of young players, but the unfortunate reality is that this league (like many others) rewards failure – the elite players will go to the worst teams at the draft after the season, while the teams that just missed out on the playoffs get stuck in the mud.

Thirdly, the fact that the Canucks went from potential playoff hopefuls to the dredges of the league shows just how bad their depth was this season, as well as how far their young players are from being capable of making noticeable impacts. Not only are call-ups forced to come into a bad situation, but low minute defenders are forced to take on huge roles.

Finally, the results that the Canucks are receiving at this point in the season are frankly embarrassing, even by a team as ravished by injury as this one. As the losses continue to mount, there has to be increased pressure on the coaching staff. Management has backed up Willie Desjardins numerous times and stated that they will “stay the course”, but I believe that’s a mistake. Even with a depleted lineup, a team that is getting solid goaltending each and every night and is deploying the Sedin twins should be able to win at least once in a nine game span, and they should certainly score more than eight goals in that time. At some point, a large portion of the blame for this losing streak has to shift to the coaching staff.

If there are positives to be found, it is that the Canucks are not nearly as bad as they appear to be. Without league-leading injury impact, players could have continued to develop while nestled into appropriate roles. Next season will bring changes, including new players like Anton Rodin, Philip Larsen, and a potential top three pick, as well as steps forward in development by their rookies and young core. With a couple of augmentations and some better coaching, the Canucks should once again be in a position to hunt for a playoff spot if everything goes right. Of course, if they don’t address their depth issues and the injuries hit again, they could be right back in the basement 12 months from now.





