KIDDIE CORPS HASN’T QUITE GRADUATED YET
Canucks’ youth movement is still a little ways away, writes Patrick Johnston.
SALT LAKE CITY The jokes in the room make more sense now, Bo Horvat admits.
“Exactly, that’s right,” he said with a laugh Monday morning after the Canucks’ game-day skate in Salt Lake City.
When the Canucks’ No. 1 centre first made the NHL in 2014 at 19, he was the youngest player on the team and it wasn’t especially close. Zack Kassian and Linden Vey, both 23 when the season started, were the next-youngest players on the roster.
Most of the lineup included players in their mid- to late 20s with a handful — like the Sedins, Ryan Miller and Radim Vrbata — in their mid-30s.
Fast-forward four years and the roster looks different and not just because the Sedins are gone.
The team’s key players all are in their 20s. There’s a crop of prospects in their late teens and early 20s. This is clearly a new era, one in which Horvat, Brock Boeser and Elias Pettersson will be at the forefront.
“I feel like an old guy,” Horvat said when it was pointed out how the team’s identity has shifted.
But he still has not quite adjusted to the idea the Sedins aren’t about to walk in the door.
“Getting there. It’s still a little weird,” he said. “I think it will feel like the new era when the regular season starts.”
So are the Canucks younger? The answer is definitely yes.
But is the team as young as Canucks management is trying to make it out to be? That yields a rather more nuanced answer, despite a line Horvat delivers that fits very well with what the team is looking to push: “We’ve got great young players who are going to step up.”
Those of us on the outside, who look at this team with a critical eye, would add hopefully soon.
See, the Venn diagram showing one circle for the current lineup and the other circle with the coming youth movement, they’re still overlapping just a little.
The team has hyped up its prospect pool and rightly so. It has found some good young players who very much look to have a good chance at being useful NHLers and, yes, that’s rarely been a thing in the history of the Canucks.
But outside of the 19-yearold Pettersson, none of those prospects will start the year in Vancouver.
Instead, the squad is filled with players already solidly in their 20s, in the prime of their careers. Horvat is 23. Troy Stecher and Derrick Pouliot are both 24. Erik Gudbranson and Sven Baertschi are 26. Brandon Sutter is 29.
As players, these guys are who they are.
This summer, Canucks general manager Jim Benning articulated the hope his “young ” players would be ready to supplant older players.
“We want our young players to play in the NHL and be really good players,” he said about two months ago. “And if they’re ready, they’re going to play. And if someone else has to go, that’s the way it is and that’s the nature of getting better in this business.”
It was a mantra he echoed again on the eve of training camp: a young player could beat out a veteran, even if the older player needed waivers. But with two young players in Jake Virtanen, 22, and Boeser, 21, already locks to make the team, you did wonder who those older players apparently at risk of missing out might be.
It wasn’t going to be newly signed Jay Beagle, 32, Antoine Roussel, 28, or Tim Schaller, 27, that’s for sure. And it was doubtful any of the eight defencemen who skated for the Canucks last year were going to be shipped out,eveniftheywereaweak group offensively.
Sure, there are still some decisions to make to set the 23-man opening night roster, but none are likely to shift those two circles toward overlap.
Canucks head coach Travis Green admits lines are still in flux. There are about five players fighting for just one or two spots. But it’s also looking very much like the roster most of us wrote down as the likeliest 23 way back in July.
With Jonathan Dahlen already sent down to the minors and Olli Juolevi and Thatcher Demko almost certain to follow, next week’s roster is likely to contain few surprises.
Of the five forwards fighting for one spot (two if Roussel starts the season on injured reserve), Darren Archibald, 28, is the oldest. Nikolay Goldobin, who turns 23 on Oct. 7, is the youngest. In between, there are a pair of 24-year-olds in Brendan Gaunce and Brendan Leipsic, plus 23-year-old Tyler Motte.
The team is taking a long look at Adam Gaudette, who left college only last spring and who’s definitely in that group of the future, but really, who is he going to supplant? Sam Gagner is just about the only veteran name you can ponder him replacing, but is Gagner, who scored 31 points for the Canucks last season, really going to be put on waivers? Gaudette doesn’t need waivers to be sent to the American Hockey League.
So, yes, younger team. No debate there. But this still isn’t the team of the future. Not yet anyway.