There are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the Vancouver Canucks’ 2024-25 season.
The team’s new signings give them a deeper, more dangerous group of forwards, right down to the fourth line. That includes new linemates for Elias Pettersson that should help him take his game to another level to live up to his new $11.6 million contract.
Quinn Hughes is looking better than ever and he was the best defenceman in the NHL last season. J.T. Miller and Brock Boeser are ready to take on all-comers in their usual match-up role. The power play looks poised to take a step forward with some new faces on the ice and behind the bench. Rick Tocchet has settled into his role as head coach in his second full season with the Canucks but isn’t stagnating, preaching a more up-tempo style of play this season.
How can you not be excited about the Canucks this season?
Canucks fans will find a way.
With all of that excitement comes a lot of fear and anxiety for Canucks fans, who have seen a lot go wrong in the team’s 54-year history. Canucks fans aren’t accustomed to success, so they’re often suspicious of it, constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop.
These anxious Canucks fans have a lot of questions and concerns for the coming season. Understandable ones. These questions don’t have any answers. Not yet, at least. These are sources of anxiety and fear for Canucks fans that won’t be answered for months and months.
But perhaps by naming these fears, they’ll lose their power.
So, let’s run through some of the biggest sources of anxiety for Canucks fans heading into the 2024-25 season.
When is Demko coming back?
This is the big one, a giant question mark hanging over the Canucks to start the season: when is their Vezina-caliber goaltender going to return?
Right now, we don’t know. It seems like Demko and the Canucks don’t even know.
That leads to further questions and anxieties: can Arturs Silovs be a legitimate NHL goaltender? Is Kevin Lankinen capable of taking the reins if he isn’t? Can the Canucks survive subpar goaltending to start the season?
What if last season was just luck?
A lot went right for the Canucks, from their PDO bender they went on to start the season to almost everyone staying healthy for the entire season to elevated shooting percentages for the likes of Brok Boeser, J.T. Miller, Nils Höglander, and Dakota Joshua.
We’ve seen teams fall off after flukey seasons before, so what if last season’s success was a mirage?
Will Pettersson actually bounce back?
At times, Elias Pettersson has looked like one of the best players in the NHL. At his best, Pettersson is a two-way, puck-possession force, with the ability to pull a magical moment out of nowhere for a highlight-reel goal.
But then there are the times when he’s not at his best. After a strong first half of last season, Pettersson fell off significantly in the second half and was a shadow of himself in the playoffs. Playing through tendinitis didn’t help but, fun fact, that tendinitis hasn’t gone away.
The assumption is that new linemates in Jake DeBrusk and Daniel Sprong will make a difference after Ilya Mikheyev dragged him down last season but there’s still that nagging worry that he might not get back to when he was at his best.
Speaking of Sprong…
Will Sprong learn how to play defence?
This isn’t the biggest worry, necessarily, as Sprong is on a cheap, one-year contract, but it’s still a source of anxiety.
It would be wonderful if Sprong could become a more complete player and earn the trust of the Canucks’ coaching staff so that he could be a permanent linemate for Pettersson. But there’s a reason why he’s on the sixth team of his career and the third in the last three years: he’s a defensive liability.
Do the Canucks have enough puckmovers on defence?
After Quinn Hughes and Filip Hronek, the Canucks lack puck-movers on the backend. Instead, they’ve focused on size, as all four of their bottom-four defencemen are at least 6’4”.
With Tocchet wanting to play a faster style with defencemen moving the puck up ice quickly and joining the rush, there is a significant question if their second and third pairings are capable of playing that style.
The biggest concern is with Derek Forbort and Vincent Desharnais, who are not the most fleet-of-foot or soft-of-hand.
Can Soucy and Forbort stay healthy?
The Canucks’ left side on defence is set to start the season: Quinn Hughes on the first pairing, Carson Soucy on the second, and Derek Forbort on the third.
The big question is whether Soucy and Forbort can stay healthy. Soucy played just 40 games last season, while Forbort played 35.
If injuries do strike the left side, the Canucks have some veterans in the AHL in Erik Brännström, Christian Wolanin, and Guillaume Brisebois, as well as some promising prospects in Kirill Kudryavtsev and Elias Pettersson, but it’s still concerning that 2/3rds of their left side played less than half the season last year.
Heck, can everyone stay healthy?
The number one response I got when I asked Canucks fans on Twitter for their biggest fears and anxieties for this season was one word: “injuries.”
Well, sometimes it was that one word. Other times, it was that one word surrounded by a bunch of other words, like “injuries to star players” or “injuries to Quinn Hughes” or “injuries to J.T. Miller.”
Health is always a crapshoot in the NHL. As much as you try to control for it with careful management of practice load, sleep schedules, and smart decisions on the ice, all it takes is for one puck to hit a player in the wrong place to ruin everything.
A lot of injuries on the ice are entirely outside of a player’s control. It’s entirely out of the control of the fans, that’s for sure.
In fact, none of these fears or anxieties are within a fan’s realm of control.
With that in mind, what’s the use in worrying?
Man, I feel better already.
