Boeser ready for chance in the NHL
Canucks won’t rush young winger, but his offensive talent can’t be denied
Brock Boeser is 20 years old and has played nine professional hockey games.
In a developmental utopia, he’d start next season enduring relative hardships in the minors. There, he’d bake, spending months — if not a year or two — practising relentlessly as a pupil in the school of “hey kid, you’re going to learn to play the right way.”
Well, good luck with that.
“If he’s not ready (for the NHL), I don’t know who is,” said Craig Button, TSN’s prince of prospects.
“He had the wrist injury for much of last year and he was still a really good player.
“On a national championship (calibre) team, he was one of the best players in the entire NCAA. He’s real. He’s a real player.
“If he’s not playing in the NHL next year, one of two things have happened.
“He’s either fallen off the map or the Canucks have got incredibly better with a lot of better players and they’ve done it really quickly.”
What are the chances either of those things are happening in the next four months? Yeah, not great.
Boeser’s arrival may have been immoderately hyped, but his onice performance was kind of lost at the end of the season, when the Canucks looked helpless.
Thing is, Boeser was really good. In nine games, the six-foot, 190-pounder led the Canucks in goals (four), points (five) and was second in shots (25).
Yes, he’s their best prospect. He had a positive impact on linemates Bo Horvat and Sven Baertschi, a duo that controlled an impressive percentage of shot attempts (north of 55 per cent) when playing with Boeser at even strength. In those nine games, when the score was close, the Canucks had 54 per cent of the shot attempts when Boeser was playing.
Small sample, of course, but exceedingly encouraging, too.
Boeser was accurate with that shot of his, missing the net just three times among his 28 attempts. Horvat, by comparison, led the team in Boeser’s nine games with 26 shots, but missed the net 12 times.
The Canucks don’t think it was a fluke.
“(Boeser’s) biggest strength is his patience with the puck,” Vancouver GM Jim Benning said. “He’s able to hang on to the puck for a long time to make a good play.”
There may be some reluctance from Vancouver’s management to push Boeser this fall, because the Canucks think that, in hindsight, they rushed both Jared McCann and Jake Virtanen.
But this is what one scout said: “The comparison isn’t even close. Not by a mile. Boeser is so much further ahead of where those two were at.” And a couple years older, too. The environment surrounding Boeser’s late-season arrival wasn’t the most fecund. On a struggling team checking out for the season, it wasn’t a spot where the Canucks were setting their top prospect up to succeed. It could have gone sideways for him. It didn’t.
Not even close.
Boeser thrived while being parachuted into an imploding team, for a lame-duck coach, without time to practise the power play, and with a wrist issue that required some rest and rehab at the end of the season.
Oh, and the Canucks don’t think he was quite in NHL shape.
“The reason we brought him up was we wanted to get him acclimatized to the NHL,” Benning said. “We wanted to get him a taste of the NHL. He still, off the ice, has some work to do this summer to get into the type of shape he’s going to need to be in to last an 82-game season.”
Benning said the decision on where Boeser starts next season will be determined in training camp.
“The one thing about these good young players we have is that, when they’re ready to play in the NHL, we’re going to make room for them,” Benning said.
“But we don’t want to put them in a situation where they’re going to lose confidence or they’re not going to keep developing.”
(Boeser) was one of the best players in the entire NCAA. He’s real. He’s a real player.