There was a familiar face at Vancouver Canucks morning skate today, as defenceman Carson Soucy was on the ice at Rogers Arena.

“Yeah, it’s awesome,” Soucy told reporters. “Skating by yourself gets a little lonely. Yogi [Canucks skills coach Yogi Svejkovský]’s got great drills, I feel good. Then obviously going into morning skate, it’s nice to actually have other guys out there… they seemed to be moving pretty quick, but it’s good to be out there with the guys.

“It’s close,” Soucy said of when he might return to game action. “I wouldn’t have an exact thing right now. I think that was a big step today. It’s honestly been getting better kind of day by day really quickly, so I think it’d be pretty shortly now.”

Soucy shared that he got back on skates two weeks ago, and also spoke about the injury that took him out, saying he knew right away that he was hurt.

“I got twisted up and it almost got me kind of behind. It’s the ones that you’re not really expecting to get blocked, I think that’s where the injuries are, like even Teddy [Blueger’s] earlier this year, like you’re not really looking, so it gets you in a little different spot. I don’t know if there’s just not as much protection kind of behind the skate, but yeah, I think it’s just kind of all where it gets you. It was just a wrist shot, but kind of got me in a tough spot.

“That one felt different, I kind of knew, but you still want to give kind of everything you have to come back, so I tried to get some strides in, but yeah, deep down I pretty much knew right away.”

Here is the play that hurt Soucy:

Soucy spoke about the addition of Nikita Zadorov, and how the hulking defenceman improves the Canucks’ blue line that will only get better (and larger in size) when Soucy returns.

“I think that helps,” Soucy said of the Canucks having one of the biggest blue lines in the league. “I guess, just kind of seeing where the game is going, obviously, there are still really skilled and smaller d-men, but a lot of the shutdown kind of comes from bigger guys. We’ll let Huggy and Hronek kind of do their thing the way they can obviously, but for us bigger guys, yeah, it makes it easy when you got just solid pairings all around.”

The Canucks have righted the ship after a tough month of November that saw the club play .500 hockey for most of the month, and they’ve returned closer to the team we saw to begin this season through the month of December. With a nice break coming — after tonight, the Canucks don’t play again until January 2nd — Soucy will have ample time to get himself up to game speed before eventually returning to the Canucks’ lineup sometime in early January.

Nation Gear’s Boxing Week Bonanza is BIGGER and BETTER than ever! From Dec 26th-31st, 2023 Save 15% on ALL merch & unlock FREE shipping on orders over $200. Check out the collections and grab some gear at nationgear.ca