Canucks welcome next generation
PROSPECTS COMING OF AGE: Gaudette brings hopes to fan base in dire need of something to look forward to
Just nine more sleeps until the year’s final showdown between the Canucks and the Coyotes. While you try to contain your excitement on that front, here are the musings and meditations on the world of sports:
Before they start building the statue of Adam Gaudette in front of Rogers Arena, the faithful should be aware there’s a divergence of opinion on the Northeastern star’s upside.
One look at the back of his hockey card — an NCAA-leading 30 goals and 60 points in 38 games — suggests the Canucks landed that rarest of birds: A front-line scorer with a fifth-round draft pick. There’s also a school of thought that given the developmental arc of players with a similar background, Gaudette projects as an NHL third-liner.
Great, you might be thinking, the Canucks already have about 17 of those.
Now, it will take four, five years to adequately measure Gaudette’s impact on the big club. But in the here and now, his signing is significant because of what he represents.
After three years of grotesque ineptitude by Vancouver, the native of Braintree, Mass., represents the start of something new for the Canucks, a new story, a new team populated by new leading men.
Brock Boeser was the vanguard for that new era last year, but he was a lone pioneer. In the forthcoming weeks it figures Gaudette will be joined by Jonathan Dahlen, Olli Juolevi, Elias Pettersson, Kole Lind and Jonah Gadjovich with Thatcher Demko fitting in there somewhere.
Not all will be with the Canucks as this season winds down, although it figures Gaudette will play a handful of games here before joining either the Utica Comets or Team USA at the world championships.
But this will mark the year those players arrived and for a franchise that has longed for some positive news, this development can’t be overstated. They bring hope. They bring excitement. They bring the promise of something new, something we haven’t seen here since the rug was pulled out from under the Sedins-Ryan Kesler-Roberto Luongo teams of more than a few years back.
We’ll also remember Gaudette as the first. He arrives with NHL size and an NHL shot. He needs to get stronger, but Canucks general manager Jim Benning says Gaudette will eventually play centre in the NHL because of his all-around game.
“He understands all three zones,” Benning says. “With centremen, the big concern is how they’ll play in their own end. That’s not a problem here. To me, he’s a skilled offensive player, but what I like is he’s a tireless worker and has good details in his game.”
That’s great. But what we like is he’s here now and the journey to what he’ll become has started.
You can say the same thing for the Canucks.
On a related subject, you wouldn’t expect Benning to be an open book on the Canucks’ draft strategy, but he did make one statement that requires some reflection.
“We’re going to take the best player available,” the GM said.
Sounds innocuous enough, but given the potential range of the Canucks’ draft position and their need on the blue-line, it does open up some interesting possibilities. For example, the Canucks might win the lottery — it’s true, we’ve checked this out — in which case they’d land the great prize of this draft : Swedish defenceman Rasmus Dahlin.
“To get that No. 1 defenceman would be huge for our franchise,” Benning says, revealing an acute grasp of the obvious.
It’s beyond Dahlin, however, where the intrigue lies. Most boards are in agreement over the next seven players and most have three forwards with first-line potential — Andrei Svechnikov, Filip Zadina and Brady Tkachuk — ranked second to fourth. If the Canucks end up picking in that range, it seems likely they’ll eschew their holes on the blue-line and go for one of the impact forwards.
The Canucks already passed on Tkachuk’s brother Matthew in 2016 for Juolevi, who they’re still waiting on. Matthew has played 144 games for the Calgary Flames and Brady is supposed to be a better.
If the Canucks end up fifth through eighth, however, they figure to be looking at a group of four defencemen. Again, this is the consensus on most boards. The difference is over who slots where.
The Quebec league’s Noah Dobson has emerged as a likely candidate for the five-hole. A size-andskill, two-way blue-liner, Dobson made the biggest jump over the course of the season with the Acadie-Bathurst Titan. He’s been compared with Washington’s John Carlson, who is not outstanding in one facet of the game, but good at everything.
Next up would likely be Evan Bouchard, a right-handed shot who’s put up huge numbers with the Ontario league’s London Knights. Bouchard’s biggest selling point is his power-play production and Benning has made clear his desire for a power-play quarterback.
That would also bring the University of Michigan’s Quinn Hughes into the mix. Hughes is this year’s Cale Makar, an undersized puck-mover with big-time speed and skill. Again, he’d fill the power-play need.
Sweden’s Adam Boqvist rounds out the four blue-liners. He’s listed at the top of the group on some boards for his puck-moving abilities, but according to one Western Conference scout, he’s not as dynamic as Hughes.
Finally, couldn’t fit this into a weekend piece on former B.C. Lions defensive end Brent Johnson, who was voted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame with former Leos safety Barron Miles, so we’ll rectify that now.
Johnson and Miles were teammates for five seasons. The Leos averaged 12 wins a year over that span, won a Grey Cup in 2006 and should have won more.
Wally Buono was asked about those teams.
“Look at the players we had,” he said. “No wonder I was such a good coach. You could have won with that team.”
Johnson retired as the Lions’ alltime sack leader and was named the CFL’s outstanding Canadian and outstanding defensive player in 2006.
“At his peak, he was as good a football player as I’ve seen in the CFL,” Buono said.
Miles, meanwhile, was a ball-hawking safety who’s second on the CFL’s all-time interception list and the all-time leader in blocked kicks.
“Barron had a nose for the football,” Buono says.