It was a very well-attended summer skate for the Vancouver Canucks on Wednesday at Rogers Arena.

All the usual suspects, as well as some Abbotsford Canucks players, were partaking in the on-ice session. The total count in attendance came to 30 players, 27 skaters and three goaltenders.

The session started with a typical passing drill in the neutral zone, which flowed into odd-man rushes the other way. However, the main focus of today was a scrimmage — two 25-minute periods with a 10-minute Zamboni break in between.

The two groups for the scrimmage were:

Team Blue: Arshdeep Bains, Brock Boeser, Kirill Kudryavtsev, Jonathan Lekkerimäki, Drew O’Connor, Liam Öhgren, Elias Pettersson (F), Elias Pettersson (D), Marco Rossi, Max Sasson, Luke Schenn, Tom Willander, and Anri Ravinskis, who was sporting a red non-contact jersey.

Team White: Vilmer Alriksson, Zeev Buium, Filip Chytil, Paul Cotter, Jake DeBrusk, Brendan Gallagher, Filip Hronek, Linus Karlsson, Victor Mancini, Ty Mueller, Jamie Oleksiak, Aatu Räty, Ilya Safonov, and Chase Wouters.

Kevin Lankinen, Nikita Tolopilo, and Ty Young were the three netminders for the scrimmage. Goaltender Thatcher Demko has yet to join the main group, but a Canucks representative confirmed that Demko has been skating on his own.

There weren’t many gameplay observations, as it was still just a summer skate, and guys are still getting their feet under them after a lengthy time off high-level competition. However, Willander looks ready for his sophomore season. He looks like he spent a lot of time in the gym this offseason. He’s clearly put on a few pounds of muscle. Even his conditioning, which he later told assembled media after practice was a point of emphasis for his offseason training, looked like it had taken another step. To top it all off, he potted the first two goals of the scrimmage for Team Blue.

The 6’6″ Swedish winger, Vilmer Alriksson, also scored a pair of goals, one being a snipe into the far side right corner. And Luke Schenn was having fun out there. With the puck at the top of the point, with nothing but space in front of him, he performed a skate kick deke, passed the puck to the player on the half-wall, and then parked himself in the slot, looking for a tap-in goal – which came pretty close once the puck finally got to him. Unfortunately for Schenn and Team Blue, he did not score.

By my count, the final score was 6-3 for Team White.

Jake DeBrusk on how the new guys are fitting in on the team: “Yeah, seamless. You know, they’re all really good dudes. You know, it’s kind of funny. It’s like the first day of school – I think I say that every training camp – getting to meet them, they obviously have a lot of wisdom not only for the younger guys but for us veterans as well. There’s always some sort of connection in the hockey world. They’ve been great guys, and you know they definitely made themselves felt so far.”

Tom Willander on what he’s learned from the new veterans in just the first few days on the ice: “I just think as a person, those older guys mean so much to us. Just teaching us small habits and just kind of pulling the group together. I think a good example is just like after skate yesterday, those are the guys that kind of pull the group together to do these like small conditioning [drills]. Like after, you might not feel comfortable telling all the people to do that. But I think that’s very important to kind of get the group together like that.”