Canucks draft picks finish seasons with fireworks, impressive stats
Good timing as the team looks to shed some contracts, fill positions in house
It's the latest — and last — edition of the tracker this season, where we tally up the efforts of the Vancouver Canucks' highest-profile prospects:
JONAH GADJOVICH
The year is 2017.
Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States. A total solar eclipse crosses North America for the first time since 1918.
And the Vancouver Canucks, in another statistical improbability, thread the needle with a near-perfect draft that's paying dividends four years later.
With two players from that class recently called up to the big club, another is taking his game to a whole new level with the Utica Comets.
Jonah Gadjovich used his size, strength and improved skating stride to score his 10th and 11th goals of the AHL season this past week, both coming in Tuesday's 5-1 win against the Syracuse Crunch.
The first goal was like so many others he's scored this season, as the six-foot-two, 209-pound power forward planted himself at the crease, put his stick on the ice and shovelled a pass into the net.
The second was scored on a 2-on2 rush up the ice, with Gadjovich skating into a prime shooting position and firing a one-timer short side past the goaltender.
Now in his third season with the Comets, the 22-year-old is looking more and more like the force he was in junior, where he racked up 46 goals in 60 games the year he was drafted.
Gadjovich was the game's first star with two goals, five shots on net and an even rating.
“Jonah is great on the forecheck, he's so good at the net front, he's got great hand-eye,” head coach Trent Cull said after the game. “I don't only want to talk about him on the power play. He's been great at 5-on-5.”
Gadjovich didn't score in the Comets' 3-2 win over the Crunch on Wednesday and was given a “maintenance day” on Friday, a 6-2 loss to the Providence Bruins.
Still, the Whitby, Ont., product is tied for seventh in the league in goals, despite playing far fewer games than the competition due to a month-long COVID pause to the Comets' season. He's also the league leader in goals per game with an average of 0.85.
The way his game is coming along, Gadjovich could contend for a fourth-line spot with the Canucks next season.
Meanwhile, fellow 2017 draftees Kole Lind (33rd overall) and Jack Rathbone (95th overall) have recently been called up to the Canucks and will likely see some game action as the team navigates through the condensed conclusion of its season.
Lind, a well-rounded forward with some top-end skill, had five goals and three assists in eight games for the Comets. Rathbone, who had three assists and 12 shots on goal in two games last week before getting called up by the Canucks, exploded onto the scene in Utica with nine points (2G, 7A) in eight games from the blue-line.
Factor in 2017 third-rounder Mike DiPietro, who shone in Utica's net last season, as well as Elias Pettersson, who is pretty good himself, and the Canucks may have five picks from the 2017 draft class play roles for the team in the coming years — some more significant than others.
To put it into perspective, one of the Canucks' best drafts in recent memory was 2004, when the team picked four players who would go on to have legitimate NHL careers. One of those players was Jannik Hansen, taken all the way back in the ninth round, and another was Alex Edler, the third-rounder who became the franchise's career scoring leader among defencemen.
There's still a ways to go, but the class of 2017 could be the deepest one yet for a franchise that's had its fair share of misses at the draft table.
And it couldn't come at a better time, as the team looks to shed some contracts and fill positions in house as it signs its young star core to bigger deals.
JETT WOO
Speaking of scoring defencemen, Woo notched his first professional goal in the Comets' win on Wednesday and was named the game's first star for his efforts.
Woo, a 2018 second-rounder, scored the goal, which turned out to be the game-winner, midway through the third period, as the right-shot D-man picked up a loose puck near the blue-line, made a move past a downed defender and backhanded the puck past the Crunch goaltender.
“It's pretty special to have my first one,” Woo said after the game. “To get the win against Syracuse was big for us as well.”
The 20-year-old had four shots on goal and a plus-1 rating in the game.
Woo was steady in Friday's 6-2 loss, breaking even on the night in the plus-minus department. He delivered a big hit in the first minute of what turned out to be a feisty game, tracking a forward through the neutral zone and knocking him off the puck near the boards.
Rookie forward Will Lockwood (third round, 2016), whose relentless game doesn't always stand out on the scoreboard, also delivered a big hit late in the game and took on Bruins forward Jakub Lauko in a haymaker-filled bout.
We'll call it a draw. Woo has one goal and a plus-7 rating in 14 games this season while Lockwood, 22, has four assists in 14 games.
Meanwhile, 2019 fourth-rounder Ethan Keppen, 20, made his professional debut with the Comets on Friday after signing an amateur tryout contract in early April.
Keppen is another big-body forward in the Canucks' system. He didn't have a great 2019-20 season with the OHL's Flint Firebirds (44 GP, 16G, 13A), but the six-foot-two, 209-pound left-shot winger didn't look out of place on Friday, putting two shots on net — although he had a minus-3 rating in the loss.
The Comets are 8-5-0-1 and sit in third place in the North Division.
VASILY PODKOLZIN
He'll be saying his dasvidaniyas and coming to Vancouver — but just not yet.
Podkolzin, whose KHL contract expires on April 30 but has Russian national team obligations as well, will not join the Canucks this season, his agent Sergey Isakov told Sport24 correspondent Maxim Samartsev on Saturday.
“The Canucks finish playing on May 16, so it doesn't make sense to go there after May 1. Because you first need to get an immigrant visa at the Canadian embassy, it will take about a month. Then he will go to quarantine in Canada, and it turns out that Vasya will arrive at the club's location no earlier than mid-June. So he is just calmly preparing for the games for the national team,” said Isakov.
Earlier in the week, Podkolzin was picked to represent Russia for two upcoming Euro Hockey Challenge games against Belarus, to be played in Moscow on April 23 and
24. The six-foot-one, 204-pound winger is also expected to play for Russia at the world championship tournament, which begins on May
22.
Podkolzin, 19, had a season to remember for SKA St. Petersburg, tying a KHL record for points in a playoff run by a U20 player (11 points in 16 games) while breaking several other U20 records for SKA.
The 2019 first-rounder had five goals, six assists and a plus-6 rating in 35 regular-season games, largely played on SKA's fourth line.