With fresh faces comes fresh optimism
Canucks now face challenge of developing young talent into championship-calibre team
In the aftermath of the weekend festivities in Dallas, here’s an interesting question to ponder:
Who, would you say, are the NHL’s best drafting teams over the past 20 years?
The obvious answer would seem to be the teams that have had the most success over that time.
Chicago, Detroit and Pittsburgh lead the way with three Stanley Cups each since 1998 and most fans would identify those three organizations as the shrewdest drafters.
Los Angeles won in 2012 and ’14 and would rank up there. So would the Devils, who won in 2000 and 2003.
Other teams have had their moments but because drafting is universally considered to be the most important plank in team building, it stands to reason the teams that have won the most have drafted the best.
There’s just one problem — it doesn’t always work that way.
Top to bottom and over the full span of the last 20 years, we’d submit the NHL’s two best drafting teams have been the San Jose Sharks and Nashville Predators. Both organizations have found productive players all over the draft. Both have been competitive on a year-in, year-out basis, although it took the Preds five seasons to make the playoffs after entering the league in ’98. Neither team has suffered prolonged dry spells that set back the team’s development.
And there’s one other thing they share: they’ve combined to win, roughly, zero Stanley Cups over the last 20 years!
If NHL history has taught us anything, it’s that assembling a championship team isn’t the product of drafting consistently well, but rather putting together an elite core group over a handful of drafts.
In the late 1990s and early aughts, the Blackhawks couldn’t find a musk ox in a phone booth but, beginning in ’02 with second-rounder Duncan Keith, they put together the guts of their championship teams over the next six drafts, culminating with the selection of Jonathan Toews in ’06 and Patrick Kane in ’07.
It’s a similar story with the other teams in question. All endured up and down cycles at the draft table over the 20 years but all succeeded in putting their core group together in the space of four or five drafts. Pittsburgh’s was so strong it formed a Cup-winning team in ’09, then came back with a new supporting cast and won two more in ’16 and ’17.
Now, you may be aware the Canucks haven’t enjoyed a similar period in their history but they did come close. Once.
Beginning in ’99 with the drafting of the Sedin twins and running through ’04 the Canucks selected Ryan Kesler, Kevin Bieksa, Cory Schneider, Alex Edler and Jannik Hansen. Remarkably, they whiffed on two drafts completely in that span, 2000 and ’02, but they still put together the nucleus of the best-ever Canucks’ teams.
True, the other 40-some years of drafting have been depressing but the Canucks had that one shining moment amid all that pain and sorrow. So are they experiencing a similar period now?
Hard to say definitively but you can certainly make that case.
Lord knows the Linden-Benning administration has sins to answer for but, beginning with the 2014 drafting of Jake Virtanen and Thatcher Demko and running through this weekend’s selection of Quinn Hughes, Jett Woo and Tyler Madden, they’ve assembled their core group.
What that will be is impossible to know but, at this moment, it represents the deepest pool of young talent the Canucks have ever put together.
That much seems obvious. If you include Bo Horvat, who just turned 23 in April, the Canucks are now looking at a reserve list in which Kole Lind is likely their 10th best young player. You can argue about what order you’d put them in but there’s Brock Boeser, Elias Pettersson, Hughes, Olli Juolevi, Thatcher Demko, Adam Gaudette, Jonathan Dahlen, Jake Virtanen, then Lind.
There’s also another layer pushing that group — oops, forgot about Lukas Jasek — but the larger point is the Canucks have succeeded in doing that thing common to all good teams.
The next question is where do they go from here and that’s where it gets tricky. The company of young Canucks have credentials and their potential is exciting. But that doesn’t account for much in the real world of the NHL.
I mean, we know those others team drafted well because we saw them parading around with the Stanley Cup.
As for the Canucks’ previous group, it might not have won the grand prize but it featured two career 1,000point men in the Sedin twins, a Selke-winning centre in Kesler who scored 41 goals in his best year; Bieksa and Edler, who formed a pretty good blue-line with Dan Hamhuis and Sami Salo and Hansen, who’s played over 600 NHL games which is 600 more than Pettersson, Hughes, Juolevi, Demko, Gaudette, Dahlen and Lind have combined.
You can look it up.
The next phase will be the crucial step for these Canucks and it will be determined by a myriad of factors.
Can this organization develop the young talent into a championship-calibre team? Can they create a competitive environment that brings out the best in their group? Can they find some early success that nurtures it? Or will that development be ruined by the constant drumbeat of losing?
It will take another two or three years before we can begin to answer those questions but, in the here and now, it finally seems the Canucks have changed the story of their team. For everything their fan base has endured over the last three seasons that’s at least a start.
Still can’t see the finish line, but at least there’s a start.