Who plays best with who?: An analysis of the Canucks’ potential holdover D pairings from last season

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.

All stats included in this article reflect 5v5 play and have been collated courtesy of NaturalStatTrick.com and MoneyPuck.com. Only pairings who played 40 minutes or more together were considered.

First, A Note on Quality of Competition

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:

From HockeyViz.com

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.