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Ask it to Bulis: Edler's trade value; Which Sedin is best?

Ask it to Bulis is a regular feature wherein casual readers and hardcore Bulies alike can put their questions to Harrison and Daniel, two guys probably no more qualified to answer these questions than they are.
Pass it to Bulis
Edler
Edler

Ask it to Bulis is a regular feature wherein casual readers and hardcore Bulies alike can put their questions to Harrison and Daniel, two guys probably no more qualified to answer these questions than they are.

 

 

H: I think the team is heading in the right direction. That’s not to say I can see the next Cup window opening -- we’re still quite some distance from that. But for a team that had seemingly no prospects a few years ago, the future looks positively, relatively bright. Bo Horvat looks like a top-six centre. Jared McCann has shown flashes. Jake Virtanen and Hunter Shinkaruk are showing promise in their respective roles. I can’t say I’ve approved of every single move the Canucks have made under Jim Benning, but as it stands, the club’s prospect evaluation, accumulation and development all appear to be improved, and I’m optimistic that this improvement will be reflected on the ice.

D: The Canucks are certainly going in a direction, but it remains to be seen what their destination will be. There’s certainly a lot to like about the team’s youth and prospects, but the team’s pro scouting, particularly when it comes to defencemen, is still a major area of concern for me. It’s hard for me to be confident for the future when guys like Matt Bartkowski and Luca Sbisa are seen as desirable NHL defencemen.

 

 

H. I'd say a bit of both. I lean towards inexperience, though. I can’t say I’m in love with Willie Desjardins’ coaching at this juncture, and I’ll bet his club’s corsi would improve if he played the fourth line a little less, but still -- it takes time to install a system and earn full buy-in from one’s team, and it probably takes even longer when your roster is undergoing such a rigorous overhaul, not to mention full of rookies and kids, who aren’t just learning your system, but the game in which it’s played. A team that doesn’t quite know how to be a team yet is going to get hemmed in their own end fairly often.

D: Neither, in my opinion. At least, neither are the biggest reason. The number one reason for the team’s woeful underlying statistics is their defence. When the guys on the backend are unable to prevent zone entries, fail to win puck battles, don’t position themselves well enough to prevent scoring chances, and can’t move the puck out of the defensive zone with possession, your possession statistics will be terrible, no matter who is at forward. The main perpetrators here are Matt Bartkowski, Luca Sbisa, and Alex Biega, but Yannick Weber has struggled with possession far more than in previous seasons, Ben Hutton makes youthful mistakes, and Dan Hamhuis was hit or miss before going down with his gruesome injury.

 

 

H: It’s not. Supposing we knew for a fact that the Canucks had no chance of winning the Cup, I’m with you. Sell assets. Tank for the pick. But the Canucks have a chance. It’s slimmer than a pixie stick, but it’s a chance, and as the team gets healthy, and the kids start to develop, the chance increases. Why take that away from them?

D: Exactly. Also, it’s not an either/or situation. The Canucks could sell UFA assets, replace them with young players, then have the young players go on a tear and take them far away from a top-5 pick. Or they could keep those assets and have their lousy possession numbers catch up to them and drive them into the basement.

In any case, I like it when the Canucks win hockey games. Call it shortsighted, but I enjoy watching them win even in a year when they have next to no chance of winning the Cup.
 

 

 

D: My money’s on the young’uns, whose fast-twitch muscles haven’t deteriorated with time. So I’m going with either Jared McCann or Jake Virtanen and leaning towards McCann’s craftiness over Virtanen’s aggression.

H: If it’s Double Dash, the obvious answer is Henrik and Daniel. But if it's a solo grand prix or battle mode where we’re just talking about who has the right combination of skill, timing, and merciless aggression, and dickish, shameless use of various-coloured shells, my money’s on Alex Burrows.

 

 

H: Now? Well, these days, Brandon Prust is a bad man and Kassian is clean, so Kassian for sure. But I think we all know that the circumstances were a little different this summer.

D: Heck, I didn’t like the trade then either.

 

 

D: The biggest failing of the Mike Gillis era was in failing to stay the course after the disappointment of the 2011 Cup final. Instead of embracing what made them successful and making adjustments to that model, they made reactionary changes in an attempt to hew closer to what had defeated them: the Boston Bruins' style of physical hockey.

H: Just win the damn Cup. This one time, they were close… but it didn’t happen. Had they won that Game 7 -- just one more game -- I don’t think anybody is ripping them for failing to maximize their Cup window. But instead, here we are.

To my mind, though, the biggest post-2011 failing was in letting the team grow stagnant. In 2010-11, Chris Higgins was acquired to flesh out the fourth line. By the end of that series, injuries had forced him into a top-six role. But then he remained there for the next four years, which should speak to the Canucks’ inability to evolve the roster, or match the depth they had when he arrived, either through shrewd drafting or player acquisition. No surprise, then, that they couldn’t match the success, either.

 

 

H: How can you tell that a Vancouver prospect is good? Because Canucks fans are already worrying about the scenarios in which we might lose him. I think Boeser will be here sooner than later, especially with the Canucks looking to build a new forward corps. You don’t want to arrive once they’ve already mapped out the future. You want to get in while they’re still drawing it up. Hot prediction: Boeser does one more year of NCAA and then puts his education on hold.

D: Yeah, this isn’t going to be an issue. I can’t possibly imagine Boeser pulling a Justin Schultz, because he’s good enough that the Canucks will want him before he plays 4 years in the NCAA and he’ll want to start getting paid sooner than his 4 years are up as well. Never underestimate a young man’s desire to start making hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 

H: For sure there’s a market for Edler. I think it’s 30 teams deep. Every single team would take him if the Canucks made him available. But they probably won’t, because then they’d be looking for an Alex Edler type like everybody else. I don’t get the hate around Edler. He’s a fantastic defenceman. He may not be the best defenceman in the world, but he’s probably top 20 or 30, which is pretty damn close.

D: Of course there’s a market for Edler. If the Canucks put him on the trading block, team’s would be lining up around the other type of block to acquire him. As I said on Twitter recently, Edler has become my litmus test for Canucks fans. If you think that Edler is bad or the main problem with the Canucks defence or even among the top-5 issues with the Canucks defence, then I am going to think less of you as a person and probably won’t take you seriously ever again.

H: Harsh.

 

 

H: I like this question, because I don’t have to factor in anything but my own opinion. We’re not talking about the greatest Canucks goal, or even the most important to the franchise -- just my favourite, and if that’s the case, I’m picking a Sedin goal.

I think you know the one, too. It’s filthy. Just disgusting. Downright lewd. After I watch this goal, I usually clear my web browser history.

If you put this goal behind a paywall, I’d subscribe.

D: Harrison took mine, so I’ll go a little more old-school.

It’s such a simple move, but it’s done at such obscene speed and with such absurd confidence. Sure, take any 18-year-old prospect these days and they could probably pull off this move in their sleep, but at the time it was just so ridiculous to even consider doing something like this in an actual NHL game.

 

 

D: I wish you had asked who was my favourite Sedin, because then I could answer Stefan, as it amuses me that the Sedins have a brother who shares the name of the only player picked ahead of them in the NHL draft. But my favourite Sedin twin is indeed Henrik. He strikes me as slightly more cheerful and personable and a tiny bit more skilled.

H: It’s Daniel, and let me tell you why: he never bothered to learn faceoffs. It’s one of the funniest things in the world to me, that Daniel and Henrik are identical in every way, except that Daniel was like, nah, I’m a winger, this doesn’t concern me, so he just slept in on every faceoff practice day. I like a dude who knows what corners to cut.