Few Vancouver Canucks came out of their last two losses feeling good about their games, and perhaps Carson Soucy – on the ice for more goals against than any non-goaltending Canuck – felt worst of all.

Unfortunately, it’s a continuation of what has been a difficult start to the 2024/25 campaign for Soucy; one in which he’s been on the wrong side of opposing offences far too often.

How bad has it been? The stats really tell the story, or at least part of the story, here.

According to our friends over at NaturalStatTrick, of the players who have played at least 100 minutes thus far this season, Soucy’s Corsi of 36.43% is the fifth-lowest in the league. He’s ahead of just Patrick Kane, Ben Chiarot, Kaiden Guhle, and Jack Johnson. Three of those players play on teams with losing records, and the other is Jack Johnson. This isn’t really somewhere where Soucy, a second-pairing defender on a team with a .611 record should find himself. And yet he does.

(The next-lowest Canuck, for the record, is Soucy’s usual partner, Tyler Myers at 40.91%, a fair step up from Soucy’s own numbers.)

These troubling stats go, as they say, across the board, too. Soucy’s control of shots while on the ice is just 28.95%, which is the outright lowest rate of any player to play 100 minutes or more this season. His expected goal rate of 31.97% is fifth-lowest in the league, but first-lowest among defenders.

His control of scoring chances, at 35.85%, is a little better. It’s only 13^th-worst in the league.

Any way you slice it, it’s an ugly spread of numbers.

And for those who prefer raw, uncomplicated stats over the fancy ones, just know that Soucy has been on the ice for just three 5-on-5 goals for but ten against through nine games. That’s not a good record by even this simplest of measures.

Now, before we go looking for positives, let’s put a little more context to these statistics. We did already mention that Soucy’s partner, Myers, doesn’t have the best numbers, either. It stands to reason that there may be a little mutual destruction going on with the pairing.

But a quick check with NaturalStatTrick’s line tool shows us who is doing the most destructing of the other.

Soucy and Myers’ Corsi as a pairing? 35.71%. Their expected goals rate? 38.10%.

If we isolate Soucy’s numbers away from Myers, we actually get very similar results. A Corsi of 37.78%, and a xG rate of just 28.32%.

But then if we isolate Myers’ numbers away from Soucy, there is drastic improvement. At 50.0% Corsi, and a 50.39% expected goals rate, they aren’t exactly stellar results, but they are better than even. It’s never quite so simple as the stats portray it, but these stand as pretty good evidence that it’s Soucy dragging down Myers’ performance far more than the other way around.

So where do the positives come in? The reasons to hope for better?

Some might look for them in deployment. Heading into the season, it was thought that Soucy and Myers might form what could be called a shutdown pair, and so those who have not been watching closely might assume their poor numbers come from the sort of opposition they face.

That’s not exactly true, however. Through nine games, Soucy has faced off with a quality of competition that can best be described as ‘near-exactly league average.’

It should be noted that Soucy has started just 36.84% of his shifts in the offensive zone, and has had about double the defensive faceoffs as offensive faceoffs. That’s a deployment factor that will reduce one’s numbers at least a little, and could be a factor here. That said, defensive-zone-heavy deployment is nothing new to Soucy.

No, if anything, the hope for Soucy turning things around comes from a recent foe in the Vancouver market: PDO.

Hold your pitchforks. While PDO is a flawed stat, it does paint at least a little bit of a picture about how the luck has turned for Soucy thus far in 2024/25.

Soucy and Myers are the only Canucks defenders with a PDO below 1.000. Soucy himself has had an on-ice team shooting percentage of just 9.09% and an on-ice save percentage of just 87.65%.

That suggests that there’s some element of bad luck here, especially on the save percentage end. Maybe some of those ten 5-on-5 goals against shouldn’t have gone in, and maybe they won’t in the future.

But one has to note here that Myers’ PDO is slightly worse than Soucy’s, and yet Myers has been able to achieve relatively good on-ice results…whenever he’s been with a partner other than Soucy.

Is this in part because Myers’ most common partner other than Soucy is Quinn Hughes? No doubt about it. But is that the sole factor here?

Probably not. All those previously mentioned numbers show that Soucy has a somewhat unique problem of allowing shots, chances, and goals against. Only the goals can really be attributed to PDO and puck-luck at all. The fact of the matter is that if Soucy were allowing fewer shots and chances against, there’d be far fewer opportunities for any bad luck to affect him. But, instead, he is bleeding shots and chances against at what is almost a league-worst rate.

That a few more of those shots and chances translated into goals against than might have otherwise happened is not the most relevant item. It’s that they happened in the first place.

Which means, to answer our question in the headline, yes, Carson Soucy has been about as bad as the statistics say. If one goes looking for reasons to be optimistic for a turnaround, there’s perhaps a little to be found in the realm of PDO, but not much.

The real hope has to come from the knowledge that Soucy has been much better in the recent past, and that he must already know that he needs to be better.

Much better.