Different role looks to be beckoning for veteran Edler
There are many questions to be posed for next season's edition of the Vancouver Canucks. This 2020-21 season still isn't over yet, but it's not too early to think that far ahead.
Here's a big one: Are these the waning days for Alex Edler in a Canucks uniform?
The veteran blue-liner said after Tuesday's game in Winnipeg that there haven't been any contract talks between his representatives and the team.
Perhaps it's not a surprise, given the space the Canucks will have to find this summer to sign anyone, let alone the veteran blue-liner. And that's without getting into what his role on this blue-line going forward should be, even if they can re-sign him.
Edler has obvious flaws to his game at this late stage of his career: The ability to defend against the rush isn't what it once was and that declining foot speed will become more and more of an issue. That's simply the truth of Father Time.
But even so, in the right role Edler can still have success.
According to HockeyViz. com, using the expected-goals metric that rates the probability of goals being scored when particular shots are taken, six players this season became positive shot-quality players when they were on the ice this season with Edler, and those six players tell a clear story: Antoine Roussel, Brandon Sutter, Adam Gaudette, Zack MacEwen, Jay Beagle and Tyler Motte.
In other words, the bottom two lines in the lineup.
And there were two players for whom the reverse was true, that when they were on the ice without Edler the Canucks' quality of shots were better than the opposition's but negative when they played with Edler: Nils Höglander and Elias Pettersson.
Top-six forwards, in other words.
And therein lies the rub. If Edler can be deployed in a depth role next season — and the price to retain him is right — there's a good case to be made to keep him.
But that also means hoping for a return to form from Quinn Hughes, whose defensive game saw plenty of struggles this season, and either the emergence of another young defenceman capable of playing top-six minutes or somehow finding such a player either in free agency this summer or through a trade.
Jack Rathbone, who is finally getting NHL minutes in the closing chapters of this season, could help with that task, though his strengths are clearly with the puck vs. without the puck. He's a bright young man who has met just about every other challenge in his life, so it's a reasonable bet to think he'll be able to improve his defensive play enough to play regular minutes on the second pair. But will that happen next season?
The other leading possibility, of course, is Olli Juolevi, but given his middling rookie season, it's less of a reasonable bet for him to pan out as anything more than a third-pairing blue-liner.
That Juolevi hasn't forced himself into the lineup on a regular basis this season, even as his team has often struggled defensively, is a troubling sign. On some nights that was also about salary-cap constraints, while some of it lately has likely been about his recovery from COVID-19. But overall the trend is hard to ignore.
Which brings us back to Edler. If the veteran blue-liner returns next year, it will be up to Rathbone, and perhaps Juolevi, to ease the burden on him.
DIPIETRO GETS CANADA CALL
Mike DiPietro's bizarre 2020-21 season will last a little longer.
The Canucks' top goaltending prospect has been selected by Hockey Canada for the upcoming 2021 men's world championship.
He'll play at least one more game for the American Hockey League's Utica Comets this week — they're in action Wednesday, Friday and Sunday — before heading to Riga, Latvia, where Canada begins its campaign on May 21.
He's expected to be Canada's No. 3 goalie, behind a pair of Arizona netminders in Adin Hill and Darcy Kuemper. That means it's unlikely he'll play a game, but clearly this is an effort to get him some more ice time at the end of what has been a nearly lost season.
DiPietro was the Canucks' taxi-squad goalie for most of the season after the club chose not to sign another netminder to serve as their league-mandated No. 3 goalie for apparent budgetary reasons. It's meant that DiPietro went more than a year between games, as he was nothing more than a practice goalie in Vancouver and wasn't loaned to a European club last fall.