“It’s been…one week.”

Is that the start of an all-time classic Barenaked Ladies song? Or a fan of the Vancouver Canucks desperately trying to stay optimistic after a dreadful 0-1-2 start to the 2024/25 season?

The answer is both.

We’re still not super sure what that song is about. Something about drumsticks and anime babes. But the Canucks fans might actually have a point.

The start has been disappointing, no doubt about that. Especially when compared to how the Canucks performed over the same period of time to begin the 2023/24 season one year ago.

In fact, let’s compare.

One week (and three games) into the 2023/24 season, last year’s Canucks were 2-0-1, making for five of six possible points. They’d scored a whopping 12 goals across those three games (boosted by an 8-1 season-opening blowout of the Edmonton Oilers) and allowed six against.

All four members of the Canucks’ core were above a point-per-game, led by Elias Pettersson at six points, then Brock Boeser with five, and JT Miller and Quinn Hughes with four each. Sam Lafferty already had a goal and an assist and seemed set to have a banner season.

One week into the 2024/25 season, the Canucks are 0-1-2, which translates to two of six possible points. They’ve scored eight goals, which might sound like a decent amount, but have also surrendered 13 against. What that means is that the Canucks’ opponents have started 2024/25 hotter than the Canucks did in 2023/24, and that seems outrageous when placed in those terms.

Only Boeser and Conor Garland are at point-per-game (PPG) status, with three points each in three games. Miller and Hughes have two points each, and then there’s Pettersson, with just a single assist on the year and a bushelful of question marks.

Yup, placing the first weeks head-to-head only really serves to highlight just how poor the Canucks’ start has been.

But wasn’t this meant to be an article about optimism?

We’re getting to that.

Because, you see, we meant what we said in the headline. It’s just too early. Just like we can’t draw any meaningful conclusions about what the Barenaked Ladies meant when they sang “Big like LeAnn Rimes, because I’m all about value,” we can’t draw any meaningful conclusions from the first week of NHL action. For better or for worse, we just can’t.

One week into last season, Pettersson was at a 2.0 PPG and looked set for another career year. He’d finish with 89 points in 82 games, a significant decrease in pace.

Heck, even Lafferty looked poised for a career season of his own. He’d go on to add just 22 more points across 76 games in all the other weeks of the season combined.

But we can look beyond the Vancouver Canucks to see the further truth in the notion that the first week is largely a write-off.

At the one-week mark of the 2023/24 season, the Vegas Golden Knights paced the league with a 4-0-0 start. Vegas would eventually limp into the playoffs as the final seed with a 45-29-8 record before bowing out in the first round.

Right behind them in the one-week standings? The Detroit Red Wings, naturally, at a 3-1-0 record with a whopping 19 goals scored across those four games. The Red Wings would go on to miss the playoffs.

In fact, of the 14 teams to have a better-than-.500 record one week into the 2023/24 season (Canucks included), five would go on to miss the playoffs entirely.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Canucks’ eventual first-round opponent, the Nashville Predators, opened the season 1-3-0 and being outscored to the tune of 9-14, which was the most goals against in the Western Conference at the time. They’d figure out the stinginess by the postseason.

Right ahead of Nashville at that point? The Canucks’ second-round opponents, the Edmonton Oilers, who started 2023/24 with a 1-2-0 record while allowing 13 goals against, the highest per-game rate in the league at the time. They’d figure it out, too.

The point to be made here is not that the first week doesn’t matter. Of course, it matters. It’s just that it doesn’t matter any more than any other random week on the NHL schedule, and due to its placement at the beginning of the year, when players are adjusting to new settings, it probably actually means a little bit less.

Teams have bad first weeks and then make the playoffs every year. The same goes for teams that have good first weeks, only to crash out later.

So, draw all the conclusions you’d like about these first three games and how the Canucks have looked in them. The answer is: not good. But don’t get to thinking that it means anything with any certainty about the entirety of the 2024/25 campaign.

The same goes for the 1-3-0 Edmonton Oilers and the 4-0-0 Calgary Flames. These are stories yet to move beyond the exposition stage.

This could be the first signs of a tough season in which the Canucks do not build on the success of the year prior, but instead flounder their way to missing the playoffs.

Or it could be the first and only bit of adversity before the team rights the ship and goes smooth sailing from here to the postseason.

Chances are best that it’s a fate that falls somewhere in between those two. Regardless, it’s something we can’t until the full story of the 2024/25 season is written.

A bad first week might mean something eventually. But it could mean a lot of different things, and it doesn’t mean much quite yet.