If there is one thing that the Vancouver Canucks have in genuine abundance heading into the 2024/25 season, it’s forwards. The Canucks have at least 16 different forwards in direct competition for spots this year, and with all those forwards come options and opportunities.

There are opportunities to do things a little bit differently than what happened in 2023/24 – and, ideally, the opportunity to do things at least slightly better.

Really, the Canucks’ only truly consistent, complete forward line last year was the unit of Dakota Joshua, Teddy Blueger, and Conor Garland. The nickname-resistant trio performed as the Canucks’ ostensible third line for large swaths of the season but often outperformed that designation. Joshua, Blueger, and Garland would score 21 regular season goals 5v5 together, and even that doesn’t quite paint the full picture of their success. At various points, the line looked like the very best the Canucks had to offer and played a very direct role in Vancouver’s conquering of the Pacific Division standings.

All of which might lead one to believe that if there’s one line that’s going to stick together into 2024/25, it’s probably this one. And yet, with so many options and combinations on the table, even here, we think that the Canucks might be able to do better for what is still supposed to be their third line.

One of those potentially superior options? Playing Pius Suter at centre between Joshua and Garland instead of Blueger. Here’s our thinking:

It is true that Joshua, Blueger, and Garland played well together and extremely well at times. But it’s also true that just the duo of Joshua and Garland played well everywhere, including with Blueger, but also with a litany of other centres between them, including JT Miller, Elias Lindholm for the bulk of the playoffs, and, yes, even Suter.

Check out this somewhat surprising stat: Joshua and Garland played better away from Blueger than with him. At 5v5, they shared 361 minutes of ice time with Blueger and produced 21 goals for while allowing 10 against and a 54.53% Corsi rating, which is great, by any measure.

But just Joshua and Garland, without Blueger, skated an additional 191 minutes of 5v5 ice time together, and during those minutes, they produced 10 goals for and only allowed three against, with a 58.72% Corsi.

Now, the wise reader will look at those stats and perhaps not be all that surprised because a pair of wingers having better numbers with, say, Miller than they do with Blueger makes a certain sense. But a quick check tells us that only four (of ten) of Joshua and Garland’s Blueger-less even-strength goals came in 64 minutes alongside Miller, and so did two (of three) of their goals against. It’s also worth noting here that, in most cases, Joshua and Garland would have been skating against tougher competition with more defensive responsibility while with Miller.

The slight uptick can’t be attributed to Lindholm, who didn’t play much with Joshua and Garland until the playoffs.

If anyone juiced the duo’s numbers, it was Suter.

Joshua and Garland skated 77:25 of regular season 5v5 ice time with Suter as their centre. During that time, they scored three goals for and didn’t allow a single one against. They also put together a truly dazzling array of fancy stats: a 64.05% Corsi, a 69.64% share of expected goals, a 63.38% control of scoring chances, and a downright silly 70.00% share of high-danger scoring chances.

And, yes, it’s true that 77 minutes is a fairly small sample size to draw any meaningful conclusions from. But it’s sizeable enough to draw some conclusions, especially considering it includes many whole-game examples of the line playing together for an entire night – like a memorably dominant performance against Montreal in November that our own Michael Liu broke down for the Statsies.

That run of on-ice success together, limited as it was, is still plenty of reason to give the Joshua-Suter-Garland line a long and serious look in training camp, preseason, and into the regular season.

Especially considering that, with this specific line filling out the Canucks’ top-nine, the rest of the forward corps really fall into place as neatly as possible.

The Canucks currently have a top-nine defined by duos, structured roughly like this:

Sliding Suter into that third-line centre slot provides a few roster management benefits. One of them is clearing out a little clutter in the competition for top-six winger spots; a battle Suter would otherwise be right in the thick of.

That allows for a greater chance of at least two of the Canucks’ three high-volume, low-minute scorers – Nils Höglander, Danton Heinen, and Daniel Sprong – earning consistent top-six deployment right from the get-go. (Or, perhaps with an excellent camp showing, Jonathan Lekkerimäki?)

The top nine would look something like:

But let’s not forget about ol’ Teddy Blueger. This setup also holds the benefit of increasing the Canucks’ ability to roll four strong forward lines – something Head Coach Rick Tocchet values – by bumping Blueger down into the 4C spot.

There, he’d presumably join Kiefer Sherwood and whichever of the Höglander, Heinen, and Sprong trio failed to land a top-six job right off the bat. Players like Phil di Giuseppe, Nis Åman, and Sammy Blais remain in the mix for extra spots and fourth-line minutes, and others like Linus Karlsson and Arshdeep Bains could be in the conversation, too.

You wind up with a forward corps of approximately:

And doesn’t that just look right?

We do realize that a coach’s favourite tool is the whiteboard and that their second favourite is the blender. We know that NHL forward corps’ are rarely stagnant and that lines get mixed up in-game, from game to game, and throughout the season.

But if we’re looking for a standard, a base model of the 2024/25 Canucks, we can’t help but conclude that – at least on paper – Suter between Joshua and Garland provides the best fit and the most apparent benefits of any of the other options.

Of course, what really matters most is how they actually play when put together.