The 4 Nations Face-off is an opportunity in many ways. An opportunity for fans to watch some high-quality best-on-best hockey, for one. A break from the breakneck pace of the NHL’s regular season for another.

And on the Vancouver Canucks-writing front, it’s an opportunity to stop writing about the day-to-day goings-on of the team and to revisit some longer-term, slower-burn topics of discussion.

The JT Miller trade has been post-mortemed to the point of exhaustion by now, and it’s just a little more than two weeks old. Or, at least we should say, the ‘JT Miller’ side of the trade has, along with the return, sent back to Vancouver.

But a little lost in all that shuffle were the other pieces that Vancouver sent to New York alongside JT Miller.

With all due respect to Jackson Dorrington, he’s not a very high-profile prospect and we still don’t have much of an opinion to share on his current or future value. But the same can’t be said for the third piece in the trade, one Erik Brännström.

As silly as it might sound now, there was a time within this very same 2024/25 season in which Canucks fans had some reasonable-to-lofty expectations that Brännström might just be a solution to their puck-moving woes on the blueline. In the present day, the difference in ability between Brännström and, say, a Marcus Pettersson type is readily apparent. But it’s also not much of a mystery why Brännström received that hype.

He arrived in Vancouver at the low, low cost of a fourth-round pick and Tucker Poolman’s contract, with most of that fourth’s value covering the cost of dumping Poolman. Brännström also arrived at a time when it had already become clear that the bottom half of the Canucks’ blueline (meaning Carson Soucy, Derek Forbort, Noah Juulsen, and Vincent Desharnais at the time) could not move the puck effectively to save their lives.

By the end of his first month with the Canucks, Brännström had six points in 14 games, which isn’t exactly beating the door down offensively, but it was at least something. More than that, Brännström had a dynamism to his play that most of the rest of the blueline simply didn’t have. He looked like he was making something happen with the puck out there, and that was something that couldn’t be said about most of his fellow Vancouver D.

But then Brännström cooled off considerably. His next 14 games with the Canucks would see him notch just two points, and then, in early January 2025, he was placed on waivers. Many predicted that at least one other NHL team might give him a shot, but he passed through unclaimed and was reassigned to Abbotsford.

Even then, however, Brännström showed signs of life. He’s still the top point-per-game scorer on the Abbotsford Canucks, thanks to his 12 points in eight games. Clearly, he was a little bit beyond the typical skill level of the AHL, and that led to some chatter about another call-up.

But before that could happen, Brännström was packaged up in the Miller deal and shipped to New York (or, actually, Hartford.) And when a trade that big goes down, the side pieces do tend to get lost in the discussion a bit. Those with an ear to the ground might have heard the odd groan and grumble about Brännström being included, but those were quickly swallowed up by opinions about Miller, Filip Chytil, Victor Mancini and, then, the subsequent trade for Marcus Pettersson and Drew O’Connor that followed shortly thereafter.

Not much time to talk about Brännström. Not until now, of course, with that aforementioned 4 Nations pause.

But don’t worry. This is not going to be a spilled milk retrospective. We’re not here to announce that we think Brännström is the next Gustav Forsling, destined to burn the Canucks for years to come with his post-Vancouver greatness.

Much the opposite, in fact. We’re here to point out that Brännström’s chances of making a long-term impact at the NHL level were always pretty slim, and it really doesn’t have all that much to do with his quality as a player.

It has to do with his size and the direction in which he shoots.

It’s not news to anyone who follows hockey with any sort of seriousness that left-shooting defencemen are significantly more abundant than right-shooting defencemen. That’s largely because most right-handed people shoot left, and vice versa, and there are simply more right-handed people in the world.

We often talk about the other side of this imbalance, as in the RHDs of the world being a more valuable commodity through their scarcity. But it works the other way, too. It makes LHDs less valuable and thus makes it so that any LHD needs to distinguish themselves further from the pack in order to get much of a chance at success.

One of the easiest ways to do that is by being larger than the competition. Brännström, unfortunately, is listed at just 5’10” and is probably at least a hair shorter than that in reality.

Simply put, there just isn’t much room in the NHL for a LHD of that size.

This notion might sound strange in Vancouver, where we are blessed with the best undersized LHD (and best LHD, period) in the league in the form of Quinn Hughes. But then Hughes’ success comes in spite of his size and only serves to make him a rarer specimen.

Aside from Hughes and Brännström, only about 17 other LHDs with a height under 6’0” have even played minutes in the NHL this season (at our last count, anyway.) Just 17! And that’s 17 of about 173 total, or less than 10%.

And, remember, that’s with the cut-off being 6’0”, and Brännström ain’t 6’0”. If we look at just LHDs who are 5’10” or under, the list is just nine players long. Those players are Hughes, Brännström, Olen Zellweger, Matt Grzelcyk, Sam Girard, Lane Hutson, Scott Perunovich, Emil Andrae, and Jacob Bryson.

Just nine spots for left-shooting D of 5’10” or under. Or, since Brännström isn’t actually in the NHL anymore, maybe that’s more like eight spots.

To be clear, there aren’t that many sub-5’10” RHDs out there, either. Just four at the latest count and just about 15 under 6’0”. But then that’s a much smaller pool, and when we look at that list of players, we see some who clearly possess less skill than Brännström and yet have received a much longer leash at the NHL level due to their handedness.

Brännström, meanwhile, continues to shoot left.

And it’s not a meaningless bias, either. It is harder to play D at the NHL level without size. We’ve seen the power of wingspan recently via the Marcus Pettersson/Tyler Myers pairing. The detriment of lacking wingspan exists, too.

We’re not here to suggest that Brännström never had a chance to make it. Only that the odds were stacked against him, and from the get-go. Then, with each subsequent year of age, Brännström’s odds lessened. He’s 25 now and was drafted in the first round of the 2017 Entry Draft. Seven drafts have occurred in the interim, and a boatload of younger LHDs have been selected in those drafts. Every year, a LHD who’s yet to make it gains new competition. For an undersized LHD, that means that every year, what was already a slim chance becomes even slimmer.

What we’re really saying here is that by the time the Canucks got their hands on Brännström, he was already at the point at which he was highly unlikely to make any major impact at the NHL level. By the time he was done in Vancouver, having been moved on from his now third NHL team, the writing was even more on the wall – especially after the whole passing through waivers thing.

This means that any consternation over Brännström being involved in this trade was almost certainly based on the lingering effects of that initial hype and maybe some of that AHL scoring prowess, and that’s about it.

In terms of the Miller trade, he’s what most folks would call a throw-in or a contract dump. And as a player, Brännström is just another in a long line of LHDs who were not able to beat the near-insurmountable odds.

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