After another frustrating loss to the Washington Capitals on Wednesday, Canucks bench boss Rick Tocchet had a simple answer when asked if he was surprised at how little success his team has had in overtime, given their star power. “Can’t play Hughes the whole game,” Tocchet said.
That’s fair, but what if we told you there’s a smooth-skating Swedish defenceman who can move the puck, and is capable of helping the team both in overtime and at five-on-five as well? Better yet, he’s sitting in the press box only a couple hundred feet above the ice every game!
Earlier this season, Erik Brännström seemed to have solidified his spot on the Canucks bottom two defensive pairs. As of today, the 25-year-old blueliner has been a healthy scratch in the past four games. This decision has many fans and experts alike scratching their heads.
Without Brännström in the lineup, as Harman Dayal said on a recent episode of Canucks Conversation, the current iteration of the team’s blueline other than Hughes is redundant. In the past four games, every defenceman in the Canucks’ lineup not named Hughes is all about physical toughness and strength.
That will always have a place in the NHL, but it’s important to complement the said skill set with a partner who has a different set of skills, kind of like the old dating adage, opposites attract. For every physically imposing, defensively responsible force such as Chris Pronger, you need the graceful skating and tape-to-tape passing skills of a Scott Niedermayer.
This is where Brännström comes in. It seemed that when he was paired with Vincent Deharnais, the bigger, heavier-footed blueliner could rely on Brännström’s ability to make clean zone exits and keep the towering Canadian out of harm’s way. Were our eyes deceiving us? Were we just seeing what we wanted to? We dove into the numbers to look and ensure we weren’t missing anything about the defenceman.
It turns out the Swede’s underlying numbers aren’t too shabby. Individually, Brännström has the fourth-best Corsi For Percentage (0.2%) among Vancouver blueliners, behind Quinn Hughes (17.7%), Filip Hronek (9.0%), and Derek Forbort (2.3%), according to Hockey-Reference.com. This stat measures an individual player’s impact on their team by measuring their team’s success at generating vs. giving up chances with that player on the ice. Players that have a positive number, just like Brännström, are making an overall positive impact on their squad.
Brännström’s skill set compliments the Canucks’ bigger defenders. The Brännström-Desharnais pair has the third-best Expected Goal Percentage in Vancouver with 56.6%. In limited minutes, Brännström and Juulsen finished 43.7% better than the Soucy-Juulsen pair at 41.1%, according to Moneypuck.com. This metric compares the pairs’ high-danger chances to their opponents while on the ice.
It’s clear that Erik Brännström deserves to be on the ice for the Vancouver Canucks, not up in the press box in a suit and tie, watching Quinn Hughes gasp for air as he plays more than half of an inevitable Vancouver overtime loss. The eye test says it, and so do the numbers.
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