Relive the Vancouver Canucks 2014-15 Season

We’ve spent the last couple of weeks breaking down the recent history of the Vancouver Canucks. Many of those years were good and invoke positive memories. Some were fantastic but eventually invoked heartache. There were the duds as well, but thankfully, those were few and far between. All of this brings us to as close to the present as we’ll get until October; last season.

It’s kind of weird to remember, among all of this mess, that the team actually finished in a relatively decent spot last year. Going purely by regular season points percentage, this would have technically been the most successful Canucks roster in team history all the way up until 2002/03, and it was a gross improvement on 2013/14. All in all, the Canucks won a lot of hockey games and often looked pretty good.

Interestingly enough, they didn’t need any particularly elite seasons to make this happen. The twins recovered from their spectacular down year, but didn’t put up the totals that they were contributing a few years prior. Radim Vrbata slotted in very nicely and lead the team in goals, but beyond that, this wasn’t an overly dominant team.

Perhaps the best player on the roster? Eddie Lack. Once the third wheel in the Luongo/Schneider debate, the Swede was well above the league average at stopping pucks and put up a very respectable record. New addition and starting goaltender Ryan Miller didn’t quite live up to his salary, but despite putting up slightly below league average numbers, managed to contribute to more points in the standings.

The biggest of these trades was obviously the Kesler deal. Unhappy with the media and fan pressure that came with playing in a major market like Vancouver, Kesler requested a trade from the team, while using his No Trade Clause to direct himself into a situation he liked. This, combined with the concurrent Jason Spezza sweepstakes, dropped Kesler’s value to a draft pick swap, the ever so controversial Luca Sbisa, the ever so recently traded Nick Bonino, and a first round pick used to draft Jared McCann.

Other than that, the trades made weren’t a ton to write home about or involve non-bluechip prospects who need more time to develop before we can say who won or lost. Perhaps the best of the bunch was the buy-low acquisition of Sven Baertschi, who had a strong finish to his season in Utica.

Free agency was where the bulk of the “improvements” came from. The Canucks lost out on super bottom sixer Mike Santorelli, but made up for that and then some with the cost effective two year signing of Vrbata. As mentioned before, the cost on Miller was probably too much, but at the end of the day, Vancouver was still able to sign a “brand name” free agent despite skepticism in their transition process.

Truthfully, it’s super hard to declare this draft good or bad yet; we had the Canucks as having an above the curve draft according to PCS when Cam crunched the numbers in July, and both Boeser and Brisebois have received positive feedback from scouts over the past few months. 

With that said, a key component to developing a good prospect is, well, developing them, and you can count the weeks since draft day on your fingers. 

The Canucks made some changes with men wearing jerseys, but made even more involving men wearing suits. Mike Gillis, John Tortorella, and Mike Sullivan were out; Jim Benning, Willie Desjardins, and Doug Lidster were in, with Trevor Linden now overseeing the process. The new coaching staff and management combined with a retooled roster left few sure what to expect.

With that said, things started off on the right foot. The Canucks opened things off by cakewalking through Alberta, handily defeating the Flames once and the Oilers twice to kickstart the year with a 3-0-0 record. While they’d lose three of their next four, they followed that by going 12-3-1 in the next stretch of games that followed. Suddenly, the basement teams looked like competitors.

Of course, they proved to be overachieving, and fell back to earth a bit, largely becoming a 0.500 team until the second week of March. By this point, however, Eddie Lack had hit his stride, and was stopping pucks left and right to secure the team a spot in the playoffs. 

The playoffs started the same way as the regular season did for the Canucks; against the Calgary Flames at Rogers Arena. Many had the Canucks as the favourite for the series; not necessarily because they looked like a powerhouse, but because Calgary’s bubble had to burst at some point. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in this round. Despite the Canucks being up with eight minutes to go in Game 1, the Flames won the playoff opener in regulation, and when things didn’t go their way in Game 2, they distracted everyone with this:

Calgary pulled off a 4-2 in Game Three, chased Eddie Lack out of the net in Game Four, and while some third period heroics from Daniel Sedin kept the dream alive, the Flames came from behind to win Game Six and ultimately pull the plug on Vancouver’s season.

It’s hard to have that nostalgia driven hindsight that we had in previous posts when the season ended just a few months ago. Obviously, there are a lot of qualms about how the team handled this offseason, but that doesn’t really attach to what had been done prior.

The most obvious point would probably be that the Canucks should have passed on Ryan Miller. He didn’t exactly lose them anything, but having the six million in annual cap space would be more valuable than a below-replacement level goaltender. Perhaps you’re able to go after a Cody Franson right now and not have to trade Eddie Lack to clear out a logjam, and more importantly, you don’t have yet another mid thirty’s guy on your transitional rebuild roster. 

Beyond that, the things that happened over the course of the season are pretty pedestrian. It wasn’t an awful year on the ice and most of the transactions that shaped the roster had some for of logic to them. We’ll see how we feel about the season ahead when we do a retrospective in a year or so from now, but in the team time, we can chalk up the actual prior season itself as something decent.