Change has come to the Vancouver Canucks blueline over the course of the 2024 offseason. Of course, that’s nothing new these days, or since General Manager Patrik Allvin and Co. took over.

Allvin inherited a D corps made up of Quinn Hughes, Tyler Myers, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Luke Schenn, Ethan Bear, Kyle Burroughs, Noah Juulsen, and a few others.

By the end of the 2023/24 season, that group had been completely turned on its head. Ekman-Larsson, Schenn, Bear, Burroughs, and more were all out the door, with Filip Hronek, Ian Cole, Carson Soucy, Nikita Zadorov, and Mark Friedman making their arrivals.

It was, without argument, a considerable improvement.

But the change would not stop there. The 2024 season has seen both Cole and Zadorov depart, only to be replaced by incoming UFAs Derek Forbort and Vincent Desharnais.

Any way you slice it, it’s a lot of turnover in an eight-man unit over the span of just two years.

It’s tough to say as of yet how the 2024/25 Vancouver blueline will perform. On paper, it looks like they’ve made a bit of a downgrade, but that can count for little when the rubber meets the ice.

The only thing we really have a clear idea of is how the pre-existing members of the blueline have performed and how they’ve performed together. With that in mind, today we’re going to do a pairing-by-pairing breakdown of those potential pairs for 2024/25 that already played together in 2023/24, all in an attempt to figure out what worked, what didn’t, and what should continue into the next campaign.

It can be tricky to compare the performances of D pairings head-to-head because not all deployments are created equal. Some defence pairings play in much more difficult circumstances and against a much higher quality of competition than others, and that can cause statistics to skew – usually in favour of those facing inferior competition.

Fortunately, this is a fairly limited factor when it comes to the 2023/24 Canucks. Why? Because head coach Rick Tocchet kept his quality of competition fairly even amongst his blueliners. Check out HockeyViz.com’s colourful bar graphs to see what we mean by that:

With the obvious exceptions of Juulsen and Friedman, the remaining members of the Canucks’ blueline all played against relatively equal-quality competition. Where Hronek and especially Hughes had an advantage was in the quality of teammates they shared the ice with.

There’s no real surprises here. The Canucks only really had one permanent pairing on hand in 2023/24, and it proved to be one of the best in the league, especially during the opening half of the season.

Hughes and Hronek dominated together in nearly every regard, including a very high rate of expected goals for-per-60 and a respectable rate of expected goals against, given their offensive bent. In fact, it might be easiest to just dispense with ‘expected’ altogether and note that Hughes and Hronek were on the ice for 26 more 5v5 goals for than they were against.

The team has talked about splitting these two up for 2024/25, and we will have to see how that goes. The success that this pairing has already had together almost falls into the category of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’

If Hughes and Hronek are to stay together into 2024/25, the other half of the top four becomes a Soucy/Myers combo, almost by default. The good news is when those two were able to play alongside one another in 2023/24, things went fairly well.

The sub-50% rates on Corsi, Expected Goals, and Scoring Chance Control might look dicey, but Soucy and Myers kept their heads above water in terms of actual goals. Their rate of expected goals against-per-60 is the lowest of any pairing that played major minutes together, which bodes well for what might be deployed as a ‘shutdown’ pairing moving forward.

There were hiccups. But Soucy and Myers still managed to play soundly against high-quality competition, and they did so without much opportunity to develop chemistry due to injuries and being paired with others. There’s reason for optimism should these two end up together again this coming season.

The old notion used to be that a Hughes/Myers pairing simply would not work. Myers plays with a chaotic nature, which is seen as the worst possible combination for Hughes’ own perceived defensive deficiencies. But neither player is what they used to be anymore, and perhaps it’s time to give this pairing another round of consideration.

Hughes and Myers did not play regularly together, but they did partner up more than just the occasional double shift – they skated entire games as a pairing several times, including in the playoffs. The results were better than decent; they were good.

Hughes and Myers had the best fancy stats of any pairing that played significant minutes together. Their rate of expected goals for-per-60 and expected goals against-per-60 were both better than the rates that the Hughes/Hronek pairing put up. All told, that 2.14 expected goals against-per-60 ranked 33^rd in the NHL amongst pairings who played as many or more minutes.

Could Hughes and Myers become a more regular pairing in 2024/25? The numbers say it’s not the worst idea in the world.

Before we knew how well Hughes and Hronek would click, there was talk at the start of the 2023/24 campaign of giving Juulsen a whirl with Hughes, with the thinking being that Juulsen made a fine approximation of a poor man’s Luke Schenn.

In the end, that didn’t happen. But all the same, whenever Hughes and Juulsen got out there together, the results were kind of decent.

At this point on the list, we’re getting into the sample sizes that are probably too small to take any real meaning from. At just 71 mutual minutes, chances are good that most of Hughes and Juulsen’s time together came as the result of half-complete line changes and the odd double-shift. But that it wasn’t an alright disaster, at the very least, gives Juulsen a little extra credit as an excellent extra option on the blueline.

Friedman only hit our list with one partner who’s staying on the team, and that was Myers. Again, we’re into the territory of small sample sizes here. But the results are surprisingly good all the same, especially considering this is a pairing of two RHDs.

There’s not much meaning to be made here, but there is evidence of why the team retained Friedman despite spending the bulk of the year in the press box. He’s a capable fill-in just about anywhere, and that’s all the Canucks really need out of him.

A sample size of 47 minutes is virtually meaningless. Which is good news, because the stats for the Hronek/Myers pairing were not encouraging.

These are two RHDs pairing together under what have to be unusual circumstances, so we won’t put too much thought into it. A Hronek/Myers pairing will be a rare sight in 2024/25 if it happens at all.

This pairing, on the other hand, is worth a little more consideration. That’s primarily because if Hughes and Hronek do wind up being split during the 2024/25 season, a Soucy/Hronek pairing will likely result.

There has been a bit of a notion that Soucy and Hronek might make a fine defensively-oriented pairing, allowing Hughes to take on more offensive minutes with a partner like Myers, Juulsen, or Desharnais. The issue would seem to be that Soucy and Hronek did not play well defensively together, giving up 66.66% of the scoring chances when they were on the ice.

But they were only on the ice for 42 minutes together, meaning they most likely did not even pair for a single game but just the odd shifts here and there. In other words, the book on Soucy/Hronek has yet to be written…but perhaps it will be in 2024/25.