Canucks’ blue-line wrestles with same issues
Coach calling for aggression, smarts
The Canucks need goals. That’s the general issue.
The Canucks need goals from their defence. That’s a specific issue.
And of course shots are a big part of the story.
There’s no doubt coach Travis Green knows what his Vancouver squad needs more of. The players know it, too.
“High scoring defencemen in the league are not easy to come by,” Green said Thursday. “We drafted a young man this year who hopefully can become that one day.”
But that’s another day. Right now, Green has the same group of players on the blue-line as he did last year. As you surely know by now, that group wasn’t up to much. They scored just 21 goals, remarkably, one fewer than they did a season before that in Willie Desjardins’ dull, take-no-risks system.
And they also gave up more shots against and more goals too (but that’s no surprise, given the relationship between shots and goals).
The solution isn’t just a simple “get more pucks through” plan. More on that in a moment.
The goal for the new season, the coach has been saying for some time now, is to play a more aggressive, uptempo style. The numbers suggest teams that play at a higher “pace” need to be winning the overall shots battle, since the more shots a team takes, the more goals they tend to score.
The coach is calling for his defence to be more aggressive this year — and smarter.
“We don’t want to give up more goals or more chances at the cost of trying to find more offence,” he acknowledged. The solution, Green suggested, lies in all five players on the ice working more cohesively.
“It’s a combination, it’s forwards turning pucks over, it’s forwards getting to the net and it’s defencemen getting shots through and being willing to join the rush.”
He singled out guys like Ben Hutton and Derrick Pouliot, players who have reputations as puck movers. Pouliot showed well offensively after coming over from Pittsburgh early last season, but struggled at times in his own end.
Hutton, of course, went goalless while picking up just six assists and came under fire more than once from his coach for his lack of fitness and influence.
(But it’s also worth noting that Hutton proved to be a solid contributor in his own end, which is clearly something to build on.)
The question remains, how can they find more offensive success as a group? The simple concept is “pucks on net.” But, of course, it’s not that simple.
“There’s such a focus on blocking shots,” Mike Del Zotto said. “It’s tough to get shots through to the net.”
As with his teammates, Del Zotto pointed to the need for a collective effort in getting more creative in putting the puck in more dangerous areas.
One of the more interesting concepts to emerge over the past year is the effectiveness of point shots. Not only is it about the literal challenge of getting the puck to the net — it’s the usefulness of the shot. There’s often an opportunity cost to a point shot: it’s a longer shot, with less probability of going in.
As Canucks Army’s Harman Dayal noted in a recent story, Hutton may be under the offensive microscope but his struggles last year should have been predicted given how weak his passing data proved to be in his rookie season.
On the other hand, Dayal noted Troy Stecher is one of the Canucks’ better performers in driving offence through both his ability in carrying the puck up ice as well as his skill at getting the puck to players in scoring positions. Stecher could be even more useful in this regard: he worked with a shooting coach this summer. So too, it’s worth noting, did Hutton. The shots matter, but so does the decision making.
Which brings us back to what a former Canucks’ defenceman once said about how to generate more offence from the blue-line — “shots shots shots shots shots” — even if it’s actually not quite that simple.