Canucks Sign Mackenze Stewart to ELC – First Impressions

As reported this afternoon, the Vancouver Canucks have agreed to an entry level contract with their 2014 7th round pick, Mackenze Stewart. At the time he was drafted, we were baffled by the Stewart pick as he was completely off the draft radar as a re-entry player, and showed absolutely no statistical indication he’d ever be ready for NHL duty. Well one year later, has enough changed that Stewart appears to be a good bet to hold down an NHL job in some capacity? Has he taken significant strides to build himself into a legitimate prospect for the Canucks?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. This is an absolutely baffling move that makes little to no sense, not only from a statistical standpoint, but from a scouting perspective as well. Read past the jump to find out why signing Stewart was such an odd move for the Canucks, and a head-scratcher for the scouting community.

Admittedly, we don’t know a whole hell of a lot about Mackenze Stewart, but the little that we do know is extremely negative and there’s a good reason why we know as little as we do. Let’s start by outlining the type of player Stewart is before we dive in to projecting him into the NHL.

Stewart is the type of player that you want to cheer for. He’s a fantastic story of perseverance and overcoming the odds, as he was born deaf and started playing organized hockey at age 12 after a series of surgeries allowed him to hear. Physically, he’s a monster as he’s listed anywhere from 6’3 to 6’5 and 214-240 lbs depending on the site (Prince Albert has him listed at 6’4, 216 lbs while the Canucks page had him measured at 6’3, 240 lbs). He’s also a prolific fighter too, racking up 21 fighting majors over his two-year WHL career, including 11 this past season.

And that paragraph there is about the most positive anyone should reasonably ever be about Mackenze Stewart the hockey player. From a statistical standpoint, there is absolutely no reason to believe that Stewart is anything approaching a good junior hockey player, let alone a guy with any sort of NHL potential. He’s a depth defenseman on a bad hockey team in his draft+2 season (the Canucks selected him as a draft+1 re-entry player) and has shown no signs of growing into any sort of competent two-way player at the junior level.

While projecting a guy as a stay-at-home D is fine, there’s still a certain threshold of offensive ability that you have to expect from a future NHL player. Brandon Carlo, for example, is a fine two-way D at the CHL level, scoring 25 points in 63 games. Given that level of offense, we can reasonably expect him to turn into a Jeff Schultz-like NHLer. Schultz was a consummate stay-at-home guy and never eclipsed three goals in one season, but his junior numbers were still respectable. With a career high of 11 points, Mackenze Stewart has nothing resembling offensive ability in his arsenal whatsoever.

While offense is absolutely no guarantee of NHL success, we know that a total lack of scoring in junior is basically a death knell to would-be pros – even for guys lauded for their defensive ability in junior. In the 10 drafts between 2000 and 2009, there is literally zero precedent for a guy with Stewart’s offensive profile making the NHL. Nearly every single CHL D that became a legitimate NHL player scored more than 11 points in one season before they were 19. Hell, even Aaron Rome became nearly a point-per-game player. Only one guy similarly inoffensive to Stewart ever made the NHL in a semi-regular capacity, and that was Mark Fraser.

If you completely wrote off Stewart and just ignored guys with his statistical profile, you’d be right in your evaluation 99 times out of 100. But a scouting staff should be able to give you a good idea if there’s any reason at all to believe Stewart is in that 1%, so I asked around for scouting opinions on Stewart to see if there was anything there.

As it turns out, the reason why there’s so little quality information on Mackenze Stewart out there is simply because scouts have watched him and made the determination that he’s not even worth keeping an eye on. There’s no exceptional physical gifts beyond being big, no plus-level defensive ability to note, and nothing projectable about his puck skills. “I bet not one other NHL team even had [Stewart] ranked as a draftable player” was what one WHL scout told me, adding that seeing Stewart get drafted “was a complete shock,” which makes the decision to not only draft him but to sign him just one year later after minimal growth absolutely mystifying. Corey Pronman noted that in his eyes, Stewart is “not a prospect.”

One interesting thing to note is that if you go back and check Cody Nickolet’s daily WHL line updates, you’ll see that Prince Albert started the season playing Stewart on left wing before moving him back to defense once defenders Josh Morrissey and Tomas Andrlik were dealt away. You have to wonder whether playing Stewart at wing was a request from Vancouver, and a step to converting Stewart into a one-dimensional enforcer. The few heavyweight fighters that remain in the NHL are almost universally all wingers as coaches have realized they can ill afford to play a goon in a key position.

And at the end of the day, that’s really all it looks like the Canucks possibly have in Mackenze Stewart: a one-dimensional goon. History tells us that actual NHL hockey players possess some offensive touch in junior, and there is no scouting evidence out there to suggest that Stewart’s defensive game is particularly strong or projects to be NHL-calibre. But the kid is big and he fights, so it’s tough to imagine the Canucks seeing Stewart as anything but a facepuncher.

It’s also worth wondering where this contract leaves Jordan Subban. The Stewart contract was absolutely not a deal the Canucks needed to get done as Stewart is a prime candidate for an over-age season in Prince Albert next year (granted, it’s possible that the Raiders would’ve cut Stewart for not being good enough to crack their top-3 20 year olds), and it just serves to take up another contract spot that could have been used on an ELC for Subban. The Canucks and Subban’s camp were supposed to meet to discuss an ELC “this coming week” over a month ago, and nothing came of that, if the meeting even happened. Time is ticking away on a deal getting done, and Vancouver is getting closer and closer to letting Subban walk for nothing on June 1st.