Canucks Recall Troy Stecher, Again

The Canucks have announced that they have recalled Troy Stecher from the Utica Comets for the second time in a week and a half. Fear not! The dark days of a Stecher-less roster are at an end!

The call up is pretty clearly in response to injuries to the top Vancouver pairing of Alex Edler and more specifically Chris Tanev, whom Stecher replaced in his previous Vancouver stint.

Stecher was reassigned just a couple of days ago, and hadn’t even gotten a chance to get into another game in Utica, seeing as he couldn’t make the Wednesday game in time, and they don’t play again until tomorrow.

You could see this one coming a mile away, connecting the dots between a couple of occurrences this morning, the first being that Troy Stecher was absent this morning at Comets practice in Utica:

The second being that both Chris Tanev AND Alex Edler were missing from Canucks practice this morning:

Even with the addition of Stecher, who we all adore, this really doesn’t bode well for the Canucks alleged intentions of winning hockey games. As good as Stecher has looked, Tanev is legitimately one of the best defensive defencemen in the league, with shot suppression numbers that are right there with Matthias Elkholm, Anton Stralman, and Drew Doughty.

On his previous call up, Stecher played in three games, averaging 21:22 minutes of ice time, and putting seven shots on net. He played all three of his games with Alex Edler. In 54 minutes at 5-on-5, the two posted a 52 percent Corsi-for rating. That’s actually over six percent better than the Corsi percentage that Edler and Tanev have cobbled together so far this season, though their metrics have been far from typical so far. Stecher has seen only negligible time with other defenders, so we don’t really know how he’s going to do part from Edler.

It’s tough to project exactly how the Canucks pairings would look without Edler and Tanev, but given that Hutton/Gudbranson and Sbisa/Larsen have been the two most frequent pairings this year by total ice time, it’s possible that they’d put Stecher and the recently debuted Nikita Tryamkin together. The Vancouver media has already been fantasizing about this idea:

It’s also possible, given that were talking about a Willie Desjardins lineup, that they all get put in a blender in an effort to keep the rookies apart, so we’ll just have to wait and see.