Ray Ferraro described Wednesday’s season-opening matchup between the Vancouver Canucks and the Calgary Flames as “sloppy October hockey,” and that proved hard to argue against. The Canucks did, after all, give up a three-goal lead in the third period. They also committed a full 15 officially-recorded turnovers on the way to that turnaround. And any 6-5 final score is probably best described as ‘fun for the fans, a nightmare for the coaches.’
Suffice it to say that head coach Rick Tocchet and his staff came out of the game with plenty of constructive feedback to offer at practice on Thursday.
But as Ferraro implied, action is early in the regular season is always a little hectic, and the fact that the 2024/25 season is expected to be a notable one for the Canucks doesn’t make it any exception to that rule. In fact, these Canucks, in particular, might be in for an especially sloppy October. And it has less to do with the turnovers on the ice and more to do with the turnover off it.
Folks probably noticed that a lot of individuals were making their Vancouver debuts on Wednesday. Jake DeBrusk, Danton Heinen, Vincent Desharnais, Kiefer Sherwood, Derek Forbort, Daniel Sprong, and Kevin Lankinen (in the backup role) made for seven first-time Canucks.
Which is a lot. It’s more than one-third of the 20 players dressed in the season-opener, and more than a quarter of the 25 total players on the roster.
(And that number doesn’t even include Aatu Räty, who has four games with the Canucks on his resumé and is also a ‘new addition’ for all intents and purposes.)
Some corners of the hockey world were complaining that the preseason schedule was too long. But perhaps not too long if the task at hand is instilling all that Tocchet structure and discipline into an outsized group of brand-new recruits.
Seven (or eight) new players is a lot. That much is obvious. But how ‘a lot’ is it?
One easy point of comparison are the 2023/24 Canucks. They debuted a lot stronger than the 2024/25 with that now-infamous 8-1 drubbing of the Edmonton Oilers.
They also did so with a lot fewer than seven new players. The only fresh Canucks out there on October 11, 2023 were Ian Cole, Sam Lafferty, and Casey DeSmith, who came in to relieve Thatcher Demko.
(Carson Soucy and Teddy Blueger would make their Vancouver debuts later in the season.)
That means that Tocchet and Co. came into 2023/24 with the bulk of their players already familiar with the system and their responsibilities within it, thanks to Tocchet’s hiring in the midst of the 2022/23 campaign.
Wednesday’s opener, on the other hand, featured a new face on every single forward line, and an entire third defensive pairing made up of newbies. It’s not just the number of new bodies, it’s their importance within the depth chart, too.
As we gaze out into the boxscores of other season-openers and outside the Canucks’ own standards, we can also see it’s not the most usual set of circumstances.
The Flames had four new faces on Wednesday in Kevin Bahl, Jake Bean, the rookie Samuel Honzek, and Ryan Lomberg, who has at least played there before.
The Maple Leafs and Canadiens also faced one another in their opening game. Toronto had a decently-sized set of debutants in Anthony Stolarz, Chris Tanev, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Max Pacioretty, and Steven Lorentz, but then Montreal came in with just one: forward Alex Barre-Boulet.
By our rough count, first-dressed rosters for other teams that have played their opening games as of this writing contain these many new players: Buffalo (4), New Jersey (4), Seattle (2), St. Louis (4), Boston (6), Florida (3), Chicago (7), Utah (technically 20, but actually 3), New York (3), Pittsburgh (4), Edmonton (5), Winnipeg (2), Colorado (4), Vegas (4).
So, as far as the numbers tell us, the only team who has played thus far (of 16/32 teams, or half the league) and has had as much of their roster turned over as the Canucks are the Chicago Blackhawks, who happen to be in the midst of a rebuild. The Bruins are also close, and then the number of debutants really goes down from there.
Overall, it seems as though the Canucks are made up of about double the average number of new players. And while, like most issues that the team will face in 2024/25, this one is definitely surmountable given time, it is an issue all the same, and specifically one that could impact the Canucks’ performance in this first month of the season.
That’s especially true with the about to head on a four-game, two-week road trip following Friday’s game against Philadelphia. Travel will, naturally, lead to even less practice time, which adds another layer of difficulty to instilling the systems and structures.
So, perhaps the bumpiness of Wednesday’s opener was a little inevitable, and maybe so too are more bumps in the road in the weeks to come. But they should smooth out soon enough as Tocchet and his latest skaters get more and more familiar with one another.
