Gudbranson looks to shake off rough season
Between his wrist never working properly and a slew of negative numbers — both of the traditional and fancy varieties — little went well in Erik Gudbranson’s Canucks debut season.
The one thing that did was his ability to make things difficult at the blue-line.
Gudbranson’s never been a big point producer, he’s just been known for being big. And while he racked up a pittance of penalty minutes last season, he’s played rough and tumble in the past.
But in Gudbranson’s limited time in the lineup — he played 30 games before needing seasonending wrist surgery in December — he did show off an underrated skill: he’s pretty good at preventing teams from carrying the puck into the Canucks’ end.
In a game that has hundreds of puck possessions during a match, forcing a foe into dumping the puck and thus giving away possession is a useful thing. As many as a third of changes in possession come as a result of dump-ins.
The next challenge is getting the puck back out of your own end. On his own, Gudbranson proved not to be terribly adept at that.
Gudbranson will be pushed down to a third-pairing role this season. That’s a safe spot for him to play, up against the opposition’s lesser forwards, who could really struggle against a defenceman who so clearly loves to stand things up at the blue-line. And that could lead to less pressure on his defence partner to get the puck back up the ice. The Canucks remain a team in flux, but if they can find the right puck-moving partner for Gudbranson, at least one part of their game could surprise.