At practice on Monday, Willie Desjardins gave a brief injury update, from Erik Gudbranson missing practice for a maintenance day to Jannik Hansen still being out for at least three weeks. Anton Rodin got a vague “close.” And, in case you were wondering about Jayson Megna, he is also close to returning.
You weren’t wondering about Jayson Megna.
But you might have been wondering about Chris Tanev, who has been out for six games with an unknown lower-body injury. Desjardins reports it will be ten games before he returns, with another four or five days of skating before he gets back into game action.
That gives the Canucks two weeks to figure out what the heck they’re going to do with the nine defencemen they have on the roster.
It’s an untenable situation that ensures at least one defenceman will get sent down to the AHL, with two more stuck in the press box. And, unlike at the start of the season, the easy option of sending down Troy Stecher is no longer on the table.
At this point, Stecher has earned a job with the Canucks. Sending him down to the Utica Comets would be a tacit admission that the Canucks have no interest in making the playoffs and are actively rebuilding. Stecher is averaging over 20 minutes per game and leads all Canucks defencemen in corsi%, despite playing on the top pairing against tough competition and starting most of his shifts in the defensive zone.
Stecher has some defensive flaws, but he actually leads all Canucks defencemen in fewest shot attempts against when he’s on the ice. With the caveat that he’s only played in seven games, Stecher has arguably been the Canucks’ best defenceman by the underlying possession statistics.
There’s actually an argument to be made that Stecher should stay with Alex Edler even when Tanev returns. Edler and Stecher have put up significantly better possession numbers together than Edler and Tanev this season, though usage plays a role in that difference.
While there would be nothing wrong with reuniting Edler and Tanev, separating them opens up some intriguing possibilities. Namely, Tanev could skate with Ben Hutton on the second pairing.
Hutton and Erik Gudbranson have been the Canucks’ most consistent pair, in the sense that they’ve been consistently paired together, not that they’ve played consistently well. In fact, they’ve been the team’s worst defence pairing in terms of corsi and fenwick, as well as giving up a lot of shots on goal.
Their struggles are partly due to usage, as they’ve frequently had to play a shutdown role, but it also seems to be because Gudbranson isn’t particularly good at moving the puck out of the defensive zone. It might be time to give Hutton and Gudbranson a break from each other and the steady Tanev might be just the thing to give Hutton the confidence to rush the puck up ice more often.
Alternately, Tanev and Edler could get back to low-key bro-ing down, while Stecher and Hutton form a young, dynamic, offensively-oriented second pairing. That’s the type of pairing that could ignite some excitement among the fans and potentially spark the offense as well.
Unfortunately, that leaves Gudbranson on the third pairing with Luca Sbisa. The prospect of those two together isn’t ideal. Sbisa has shown signs of improvement this season, even putting up respectable possession statistics. He’s done that, however, in a fairly sheltered role. That sheltering was presumably to protect his early-season defence partner, Philip Larsen, but it had the effect of showing Sbisa in a good light as well.
If paired with Gudbranson and asked to do more of the defensive heavy-lifting, Sbisa might struggle. We’ve already seen it in the last few games, as some of the typical Sbisa mistakes and turnovers in his own end of the ice have come creeping back.
Perhaps the best solution, then, would be to put Stecher with Sbisa and shelter that pairing with offensive zone starts against weaker competition.
That leaves Larsen and Nikita Tryamkin on the outside looking in, with Alex Biega presumably hung out on the waiver wire.
I still think Larsen can contribute—he’s been decent enough at 5-on-5 when on the third pairing with Sbisa, only really struggling when he was put on the first pairing with Edler—but Stecher has bumped him out of the lineup. As for Tryamkin, there’s still a lot of excellent potential there, but missed in the excitement of his physical play, penalty killing, and gap control on the rush is that the puck is almost always in his own end of the rink when he’s on the ice. His underlying statistics have not been good enough to keep him in the lineup once Tanev returns.
That leaves Alex Biega as the sole remaining candidate to get sent down to Utica. There has been a hesitance to waive Biega, possibly due to concerns that he would get claimed or possibly because they want to get him into enough NHL games this season to make him eligible for the expansion draft.
At this point, it’s hard to see any other recourse but to put Biega on waivers and hope he gets through. If so, they can call him up later in the season to get him into some games or bite the bullet and accept that they’ll have to expose Luca Sbisa to the expansion draft.
