When Erik Brännström hit waivers on Sunday, some thought it might be an indicator of an impending Vancouver Canucks trade. It wasn’t, but it was a sign of even better news.

Filip Hronek joined the Canucks on the road in Winnipeg, presumably on the cusp of returning to the lineup. That means that – for the first time since the very early going of the 2024/25 season – the Canucks have their full complement of blueliners available. For now, that’s a set of eight that includes Hronek, Quinn Hughes, Carson Soucy, Tyler Myers, Vincent Desharnais, Derek Forbort, Noah Juulsen, and Guillaume Brisebois.

Brännström, meanwhile, will remain in Abbotsford awaiting a recall after clearing waivers on Monday.

Now, Brisebois aside, that’s the same set of seven D that the Canucks intended to start the season with. But the comings and goings of various defenders from the lineup have made it difficult for the coaching staff to settle on any dedicated pairings, aside from the top one.

With everyone back in action, we thought it was as good a time as any to look at the blueline’s numbers so far, and specifically the stats of each potential pairing.

It’s a demonstration of how things have gone so far, yes. But it’s also, perhaps more importantly, a bit of a signpost as to how Rick Tocchet and Co. might best arrange their pairings moving forward.

No surprises here.

By literally any measure, the Hughes/Hronek pairing is the Canucks’ best, and as soon as Hronek returns to the lineup, he’ll be going right back to Hughes’ right flank.

This duo outscores the opposition by double, and controls all aspects of the game to an exceptional degree. They do all this while facing at best league-average competition, and often a quality of competition much higher than that.

Hughes and Hronek has to remain the top pairing. It’s the only thing that truly works.

If we were taking bets on which D pairing had the second-best xG rate, we don’t think much money would have been put on Forbort/Desharnais. And yet…

There’s obviously a few caveats that need to be mentioned here. When paired together, Forbort and Desharnais are the bottom-pairing, and they’re deployed as such. That means a lower quality of competition and avoiding opposing top-sixes whenever possible.

Still, a bottom pairing is exactly what these two players were signed to be. And, in the limited amount of time they’ve actually been paired together, that’s what they have been.

The xG% says that the discrepancy in goals for and against should even out over time. So long as they can keep their heads above water like this, Forbort and Desharnais will continue to get shifts together.

Get this: Hughes features on both the busiest and the second-busiest blueline pairings on the Canucks this season. He’s just that important.

Hughes/Myers will never be the equivalent of Hughes/Hronek. But the numbers make an appealing case that this pairing might be better than most assumed. They, too, outscore opponents at a rate of nearly double at even-strength, and that xG% isn’t too far off of that of the top pairing.

Why does this matter? Well, you’ll see lower down in the chart. As the Canucks struggle to put together a competent bottom-four, it’s worth noting that Hughes/Myers can work as a pairing. That could allow the Canucks to deploy Hronek elsewhere, in places where functional pairings are harder to come by.

This one just barely made it across the 50-minute threshold, and we don’t have that much to say about it. This looks like 50ish minutes of low-event hockey with a rate of expected goals that is roughly at the Canucks’ Hughes-less average.

Keep in mind, this was the Canucks’ top pairing for a couple of games! They performed adequately together, especially with that much responsibility, and that’s all we can say at this point.

If there’s one conclusion to be reached from this chart, it’s that the Canucks have a bit of an issue in finding a spot on their blueline for Carson Soucy.

He worked well with Myers as a pairing last year, but not so much in 2024/25. The two have played a high quality of competition as the de facto second pairing, it’s true, but they’ve also absolutely bled both goals and chances against.

This, really, is the issue at hand. Hughes/Hronek works as a first pairing and Forbort/Desharnais seems do okay as the bottom pairing. But then what does one do with Soucy and Myers in the middle when they just don’t play well together anymore?

Who would have guessed that Soucy/Juulsen would be the Canucks’ most frequent non-Hughes pairing on the season?

When first put together, Soucy and Juulsen turned some heads, and in the positive sense. ‘At least,’ folks could be heard to remark, ‘They look better together than Soucy did with Myers.’

But that was then, and this is now. About 265 minutes later, Soucy and Juulsen plainly do not work well together as a pairing. They may not bleed goals against quite as bad as Soucy/Myers do, but they let chances and expected goals by at the exact same rate.

As the Canucks settle on new pairings, this is one for them to decidedly move away from. Like we said in the previous section, where that leaves Soucy remains to be seen. There isn’t an easy answer here. But the answer is definitely not this one.

Of the two pairings listed at the bottom here, a revisit of ‘Soucy/Myers’ seems more likely than a continuation of ‘Soucy/Juulsen.’