The Vancouver Canucks are missing a key piece to their blueline in Filip Hronek after a lower body procedure is expected to keep him out for the next eight weeks. Hronek being the team’s best right-side defenceman by a considerable margin, Patrik Allvin and Jim Rutherford may feel more urgency to find a replacement for the Czech defenceman for the time being.
The team now shows a right side consisting of Tyler Myers, Noah Juulsen, and Vincent Desharnais, which is certainly a concern for long-term success. It lacks a true top-pairing right-shot defenceman.
The question is how does management solve the issue, and what would be the right move to make to add another piece to the Canucks’ defence corps?
Of course, the team still has its first and second-round picks for the 2025 and 2026 drafts. Management has shown they are willing to move draft capital to acquire big-name talent to add to their roster, as we’ve seen when they added Filip Hronek and last season when they brought in Elias Lindholm.
That being said, moving draft capital every year can come at a high cost, hindering teams’ ability to draft higher-end prospects and continue to build for the future.
The Canucks have some good up-and-coming prospects, such as Jonathan Lekkerimäki, Tom Willander, and Elias Pettersson, that could be seen as trade chips as well. However, the team doesn’t necessarily need to move one of these top prospects or draft picks to acquire a serviceable defenceman in the absence of Hronek.
The Canucks’ forward depth runs quite deep and moving a current NHLer to bring in that serviceable defenceman may be the right move for the team to make.
The Canucks lines when fully healthy look something like this:
DeBrusk – Pettersson – Sherwood
Suter – Miller – Boeser
Joshua – Blueger – Garland
Heinen – Räty – Höglander
Outside of these 12 forwards that would likely be your regulars in the lineup, the team has seven other forwards under NHL contracts that have NHL experience.
Max Sasson has had a very solid showing in his stint with the club and doesn’t look out of place in an NHL lineup.
Arshdeep Bains is another player who has shown he can play in the NHL, although he has not been able to produce, he’s shown that he can be responsible defensively and won’t hurt the team when playing around nine minutes a night.
Nils Åman, similar to Bains, isn’t going to be an NHL producer, however, he can kill penalties and be a solid defensive forward who, as the cliché goes, gets pucks in deep and is hard on the forecheck.
Those are likely your top three options for call-ups, with the other four being Jonathan Lekkerimäki, who would be higher on the list but would likely benefit most from staying down in the AHL and developing there for the time being.
Linus Karlsson, who is back from injury and even played playoff games for the Vancouver Canucks last season.
Phil Di Giuseppe is another player that, when he comes back from injury, could be an option to call up and put in the lineup and has had some success with the Canucks in previous seasons.
Nathan Smith has also seen NHL action back when he was with the Arizona Coyotes, though we haven’t seen him up with the Vancouver Canucks having him as essentially the team’s sixth or seventh option to be called up shows the amount of forward depth this organization has.
Having the amount of depth the Canucks have, the team could very well take advantage of this to acquire a much-needed defenceman and slide some of these guys up the depth chart after trading one of the NHL regulars.
The most obvious trade piece would be Nils Höglander, being used as a bottom-six forward for the team at the moment and seeming to have lost Head Coach Rick Tocchet’s trust in him, despite having a 24-goal season last year.
Sliding any of Sasson, Bains, or Åman onto that fourth line wouldn’t be a massive downgrade by any means with the way Höglander has played so far this season, having only five points through 26 games and averaging a career-low in minutes played.
Management is certainly going to be exploring options to add to the team’s defence corps, however, using a player like Nils Höglander and possibly a late-round draft pick may be the most ideal way for the Canucks to do so.
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