Without JT Miller, this recent section of the 2024/25 season was always going to be a difficult test for the Vancouver Canucks. Many wondered if the Canucks, on both a team and individual basis, would step up in Miller’s absence, or the opposite. And, for the most part, they’ve been stepping up.

Perhaps no player on the roster was in greater need of a step-up than Carson Soucy. With the potential exception of Elias Pettersson in the early going, no Canuck has drawn more criticism this season than Soucy. Counted on to anchor a second pairing alongside Tyler Myers, Soucy just hadn’t been getting it done thus far this year, and was beginning to look like a problem in need of solving.

Indeed, when looking over the stats from the past four games as of this writing – against Nashville, New York, Ottawa, and Boston – Soucy’s name definitely stands out from the crowd. And on first blush, it’s more mostly negative reasons.

Across those four games in their entirety, Soucy has the second-lowest 5-on-5 Corsi rating at an abysmal 33.61% – trailing only Brock Boeser, who just returned from a head injury. He’s got just a 38.50% control of shots, a 29.66% expected goals rate, and just a 30.61% control of scoring chances.

That all sounds pretty porous, and in line with the general reputation that Soucy’s 2024/25 performance has earned.

So we decided to dig a little deeper into the minutes that Soucy is actually playing to see if we can see any statistical signs of a turnaround.

The first thing worth mentioning is that Soucy has broken even over these past four games, at least in terms of even-strength goals in and out. He’s been on the ice for three goals for, and three against.

Which might really be saying something, given the strength of competition Soucy has been facing. This is where NaturalStatTrick’s ability to break down the matchups within games becomes very useful.

So, here’s the thing. When Roget got into this in the morning, the author was quite surprised to see that Soucy’s head-to-head stats against his toughest matchups were…not bad at all, actually. Rather good, in fact. Now, a wiser writer might have found these results too good to be true. Suspiciously so. But not Roget! Marching forward, Roget wrote an entire article that stated, in general, that although Soucy’s overall stats are poor, at least he’s doing a good job of shutting down opposing stars.

Except…wait for it…Roget was reading the matchups backwards. The blame lies in both the early hour this was first written and basic incompetence.

So, where the first edition of this article highlighted the good in Soucy’s shutdown game, this updated edition must do the opposite, and reinforce the bad.

Starting with the Nashville game, we can state pretty confidently that Filip Forsberg is their greatest offensive threat. At even-strength, it was not Soucy, but Myers who played the most minutes against Forsberg at 7:40. But Soucy was right behind him at 6:30, and Soucy’s head-to-head results against Forsberg were….not great.

See, when we thought those numbers represented Soucy’s performance against Forsberg, we were understandably pleased. Upon learning that they actually represented Forsberg’s performance against Soucy, they took a different shape.

Sure, it’s nice that Soucy kept Forsberg off the board. But he also absolutely bled chances against. That trend, unfortunately, continues.

The New York Rangers have a few more offensive threats to offer than the Predators, but the best of the bunch is definitely still Artemi Panarin.

Last Tuesday, the pairing of Quinn Hughes and Filip Hronek drew the bulk of the Panarin matchups, and they were only scored on once.

Soucy, meanwhile, skated about half as many minutes as they did against Panarin…and the results were pretty similar to his matchup against Forsberg.

Again, when we thought the above numbers were Soucy v. Panarin, they looked great. As Panarin v. Soucy, they’re not.

Soucy did keep Panarin off the scoresheet. Hughes and Hronek did not. And that counts for something. But with those other numbers, it’s hard to call it shutdown hockey.

And we’ve still got two more games to talk about.

It’s a bit of a coin-flip as to who Ottawa’s best forward is, down to Tim Stutzle or Brady Tkachuk. Either way, it doesn’t really matter for the purposes of our topic at hand, because Soucy led the Canucks in 5-on-5 minutes against both Stutzle and Tkachuk on Saturday.

We’ll use Stutzle as our individual case study here, because we think he’s probably the greater talent, and because Tkachuk spent a lot of Saturday running around like a moron.

When we first wrote this up, we described this Soucy performance as “less impressive” than the previous two. That is, of course, exactly backwards. Here, Soucy actually managed to keep things relatively even against Stutzle, only giving up the barest of edges in all the fancy stats.

Once again, we’ll note, no goals were scored with both Stutzle and Soucy on the ice, and when it comes down to it, that’s a win for Soucy and a loss for Stutzle. This, right here, is Soucy’s actual best shutdown performance in recent memory, contrary to what our earlier article would have you believe.

Which brings us to the Bruins. Here, it has to be said that the entirety of the Canucks did a great job shutting down the entirety of the Bruins. This was not the Carson Soucy show, exclusively. In fact, it was Myers, not Soucy, who played the most minutes against David Pastrnak, and Myers did exceptionally well in those minutes.

But this article isn’t about Myers, it’s about Soucy. And he, too, played big minutes against Pastrnak and experienced…well, less success than we thought he did this morning.

This is more in line with the Forsberg and Panarin matchups. Again, Soucy absolutely hemorrhages shots and chances against. But…Pastrnak does not score, and nor do his linemates. There may not be the same trend here that we thought we saw earlier, but there is a trend here, and it’s not all negative.

In the first draft, we told you to “take this analysis with a bit of a grain of salt.” Given recent events, we’re upgrading that to an entire brick of salt. Again, sorry about all this.

But…maybe there is something here worth talking about all the same.

One could definitely look at Soucy’s statistics against top-tier opposition and say that he is struggling in his current deployment as a shutdown defender. The Corsi, the expected goals, the scoring chances; they all say that the other team’s stars are burying Soucy in his own end.

Then again, the thing they’re not burying is pucks in the net. And, at the end of the day, isn’t that really the most important measure of a shutdown defender’s success? All those scoring chances didn’t buy Pastrnak or any of the Bruins a goal, and it was Soucy’s team that walked away with the win.

Overall, we’re not too sure. All we can say is that we’ll be keeping an eye on the charts from here on out — and on the right side of those charts, too.

It has been a rough start to 2024/25 for Soucy. But the longer he goes without surrendering goals against when matched up against the top line, the harder it will be to say he’s not succeeding. Call this one, like Roget’s investigative journalism, a work in progress.