Scattered meteorological reports coming into Vancouver on Saturday evening seemed to indicate that the sky may not, in fact, be falling. We’re working feverishly to confirm these reports.

Yes, a 3-0 shutout win over the Philadelphia Flyers feels like the right way to get the 2024/25 season on back on track for the Vancouver Canucks. That is, if ‘getting back on track’ is even the right term to use.

It’s true that this 2024/25 campaign sure feels as though it’s off to a much worse start than was the 2023/24 season. But vibes only go so far before they run into rock-solid facts, and the rock-solid facts say that this Canucks team has the exact same amount of points after five games (six points) as did last year’s Canucks team.

In terms of the standings, these Canucks are off to the exact same start.

And if we dive a little further into the statistics, we’ll find that perhaps these Canucks are also off to what could be called a more legitimate start.

Fair warning: we’re about to talk about PDO, a term that almost came to be a dirty word in Vancouver circles last year. For those that don’t recall or have worked to excise that memory from their minds, PDO (which doesn’t actually stand for anything) is essentially just a fancy for a team or player’s combined on-ice save percentage and on-ice shooting percentage. It’s traditionally been held up as one of the best general measures of ‘puck-luck,’ with the belief being that teams with a higher-than-average PDO are experiencing good luck that will eventually run dry, and that teams with a lower-than-average PDO are experiencing bad luck that will eventually even out.

At least, that’s the idea. But as Canucks fans found out last year, that doesn’t always ring true. The 2023/24 season saw the Canucks lead the league in PDO by a fairly large margin from pretty much the get-go. Thus, as the Canucks began to rise up the standings through October 2023 and into the months thereafter, countless analysts could be heard wondering when the bubble was going to burst, when the PDO was going to turn, and when the Canucks would come crashing back down to Earth.

But that didn’t really happen. The Canucks’ PDO did eventually slip a bit, and a couple of the wheels fell off their wagon at times. But they still kept that PDO at the top of the league for the entire season, and they still claimed the Pacific Division crown on route to the second round of the playoffs.

In other words, the bill never really came due on the 2023/24 Canucks’ supposedly borrowed time.

All the same, it’s probably good news that the 2024/25 Canucks are achieving what success they are without that benefit of an outsized PDO.

It’s still early. Very early. But not quite as early as the calls about the Canucks’ PDO came last year. So, we think it’s still fair play to point out that the same cannot be said this year.

Following Saturday’s win in their fifth game, the Canucks now sit with an on-ice shooting percentage of 7.89% (11^th lowest in NHL) and an on-ice save percentage of 92.86% (10^th highest in NHL), which adds up to a PDO of 1.008. That PDO ranks the Canucks right at the middle of the pack as the 18^th-highest current PDO.

Right off the bat, one can see how these stats can become easily skewed, especially earlier in the year. That on-ice save percentage shot way up following Kevin Lankinen’s 26-save shutout. Prior to that, the Canucks were down in the PDO basement.

Either way, it’s what the pundits would call a much more sustainable PDO than they had going last year.

After the first five games of the 2023/24 campaign, the Canucks had the second-highest PDO in the league at 1.077, made up of a 94.66% on-ice save percentage and a 13.04% shooting percentage that was almost double the rate they are scoring at now.

Which brings us to the real key difference at play here, which is that of expectations.

One of the biggest reasons why the PDO issue became such a hot topic in Vancouver last year was because the Canucks were defying preseason expectations. They were quite simply performing far better than anyone foresaw, and that led to folks trying to figure out how that could be. Naturally, the team’s outsized PDO was zeroed in on as the potential culprit; the smoking gun that proved the Canucks weren’t actually as good as their point-totals suggested they were.

By now, we know the truth. The Canucks were that good. They took the eventual Western Conference Champions to Game 7 of Round Two. And that has obviously changed expectations heading into 2024/25.

We can look at this current edition of the Canucks and see, at the very least, a better array of offensive talent than was assembled at this point last year. We also know a bit more about what these particular players can do.

For those who still give some credit to PDO, that flips the script entirely. Whereas last year, people wondered how the Canucks could be so good, and thought the PDO-based puck-luck must be the reason. This year, we can reasonably look at these Canucks and state that they should not have a bottom-ten shooting percentage. Not with Brock Boeser still on fire, not with Nils Höglander still shooting out the lights, not after adding all of Jake DeBrusk and Daniel Sprong and Danton Heinen.

Folks could now reasonably look at the Canucks’ current PDO and reason that, over time, it should rightfully increase, and that should lead to the Canucks beginning to perform a little better on the ice as they get deeper into the season.

What a nice change to the narrative.

Or, at the very least, folks can take some serious solace in knowing that it’s looking like they’ll be hearing about PDO a lot less throughout 2024/25. Which, for many, is a win worth celebrating nearly as much as Saturday’s victory over the Flyers.