Brock Boeser to Make Season Debut Tonight Against the Jets

Canucks fans will finally get the chance to see their club’s prized prospect Brock Boeser in regular season action. With the Winnipeg Jets coming to Rogers Arena to end the Canucks three-game opening homestand, Canucks head coach Travis Green confirmed that Boeser will make his debut.

In seven pre-season games, Boeser led all Canucks in scoring with seven points (four goals and three assists). As Green has often pointed out, though, most of those points came in the earliest games of the pre-season, and Boeser waned as the Canucks got closer to the real thing.

Last season, Boeser had five points (four goals and one assist) in nine NHL games and generated shots at an exceptional pace.

To accommodate Boeser’s debut, Green has opted to sit Alexander Burmistrov against his former team. In two games with the Canucks, Burmistrov is pointless with one shot and a minus-one rating. His underlying metrics don’t paint a brighter picture, as the Canucks have only controlled 42% of five-on-five shot attempts with Burmistrov on the ice.

The case for Burmistrov is easier to make when you look at the contributions his line has made to the Canucks efforts so far though. The third line of Sam Gagner, Burmistrov and Jake Virtanen are one of two lines for the Canucks who’ve left the shot attempt battle at even strength with their heads above water.

Getting Boeser into the lineup is obviously the right decision, but it’s one you make with the end goal of improving your team’s chances of winning. If you have to take out a player that’s proven himself somewhat effective in his first two games rather than the obvious weak link to do so, you do it at the expense of the net value gain that adding Boeser to your lineup should provide.

From where I’m sitting, putting a player like Derek Dorsett in the press box makes far more sense than Burmistrov. But, hey, at least Boeser is getting his shot. Sometimes, you get what you need.