Drance: 2022 was the year the Canucks cemented themselves in the ‘mushy middle’

The new year brings with it a natural, organic opportunity for retrospection. And resolution.

So it was that the Vancouver Canucks played the Calgary Flames on New Year’s Eve and played them evenly until the third period, but still lost. This wasn’t a bad performance and Vancouver pressed hard for the equalizer. The Canucks simply aren’t in Calgary’s weight class.

The whole thing felt like a fitting end to 2022 for this iteration of the hockey club. As did the fact that the result didn’t matter in terms of Vancouver’s perch relative to the rest of the league in the 2022 calendar year.

The Canucks will end 2022 ranked 19th out of 32 NHL teams by point percentage. The Washington Capitals shellacked the Montreal Canadiens earlier in the day and ensured that regardless of whether Vancouver had won or lost Saturday night, they’d be stuck in that spot.

Nineteenth is a loaded position for an NHL team to occupy over the course of an 84-game sample. It’s “mid,” as the kids say.

Not the best, not the worst. Just average. Mediocre.

The Canucks spent 2022 occupying and solidifying their spot in the mushy middle of the NHL’s current hierarchy. It actually took significant progress to get there, considering how poorly the club performed in 2021.

Nevertheless, the middle is dead in the NHL.

Consider the other teams that ranked 16th to 20th over the past 12 months — the Capitals, the Winnipeg Jets, the New York Islanders, the Nashville Predators and the Canucks.

All of these franchises have a pool of prospects outside the NHL’s top 10, based on The Athletic‘s recent pipeline rankings. Most of these five teams have both made and missed the postseason over the past four years, aside from the Capitals. None of these sides have been selected in the top five of the NHL draft in the last five years.

None are considered credible Stanley Cup contenders — Las Vegas considers the Jets as having the best odds of winning outright among this group at 18-to-one. And none of them are likely to select in the top five of a loaded NHL entry draft class either.

With guaranteed contracts and a hard salary cap, the contemporary NHL is exceedingly cruel in structural terms. That cruelty has been exacerbated further in recent seasons by the suffocating pressure of the flat cap.

It’s enormously difficult to build an elite side in the salary cap era. The amount of talent required to compete with the Tampa Bay Lightning, the Colorado Avalanche, the Carolina Hurricanes and the Boston Bruins is dizzying.

And even if an organization manages to achieve just that and construct a contending roster, it guarantees nothing in the Stanley Cup playoffs and it’s nigh impossible to keep teams together over the long haul.

The league structure offers respite to teams in the copious prizes it showers on clubs that are truly awful.

The draft lottery introduces some randomness at the absolute top of the draft order, but the worst teams enjoy better lottery odds and still pick earlier on balance and do so throughout the draft. Trade market prices become significantly inflated at the trade deadline, providing also-rans and sellers with a built-in arbitrage opportunity.

And just as it requires a stupendous level of skill throughout a team’s roster to be great in the NHL, however, it requires an incredible lack of skill to be truly terrible. In a hard cap system, finishing 30th, 31st or 32nd can only be done with intentionality.

At the top, there is hope. At the bottom, there is hope.

In the middle, where the Canucks reside, there is only emptiness and inconsistency.

Which is the problem when we look back at 2022. The year opened with new management in tow and the club on a heater win streak playing for a new head coach — one of the winningest regular season coaches in the history of the sport.

For the first four months of 2022, the Canucks could do no wrong. The market was energized, the club’s diverse front office hires were applauded and cries of “Bruce There It Is” echoed from the upper decks.

Then things began to unravel, in part because, despite the myriad changes, the club behaved consistently with what’s come before.

A middling team was further entrenched as the club declined to trade JT Miller and instead extended him, opted to settle with rather than walk away from Brock Boeser and wouldn’t part with assets to move a contract longer and more arduous than Jason Dickinson’s. Meanwhile, additional long-term cap commitments were added and more futures were spent for the benefit of this club’s short-term health.

Through it all, Vancouver witnessed some positively brilliant individual performances. Miller had 94 points in 82 games in 2022. Bo Horvat scored at a 50-goal per 82-game pace. Elias Pettersson found his game and established himself without question as one of the top-10 pivots on the planet. Thatcher Demko looked for extended stretches like one of the league’s best puck-stoppers.

Those performances — and this club’s trademark combination of high-end finishing skill and excellent goaltending — kept the Canucks out of the cellar in 2022. In the big picture, however, those performances were undermined by this club’s year-long inability to keep the puck. out of the net four-on-five, because of a poorly constructed forward group lacking in heaviness and two-way know-how. It’s also due to a limited defense corps incapable of supporting the sort of dynamic 200-foot game that contemporary NHL teams require.

So here we are, preparing to pop corks and usher in a new year with Vancouver’s playoff odds rapidly fading with another loss on Saturday.

In 2023 the club will likely miss the playoffs again. There will be pressure to sell at the deadline, but also the sufficient reason — since the team isn’t likely to truly bottom out, without doing so intentionally — to hold steady (if you squint).

The club will face some difficult decisions in negotiations with key players — most notably Horvat, but also Andrei Kuzmenko and Pettersson — and there’s still no straightforward path to carving out the cap space required to truly renovate the back end.

President of hockey operations Jim Rutherford, and company believe that they can identify more Ethan Bear and Kuzmenko types. Then they can fill out the roster around Pettersson and Demko and Quinn Hughes with younger, faster and tougher players.

Combine that with a new coach that adheres to new management’s stylistic and structural preferences — and Canucks leadership believes this can be turned around conventionally.

The top-end talent that Vancouver boasts provides some reason to believe that they can do it. Without question, Rutherford and general manager Patrik Allvin have done well in identifying useful depth pieces.

Still, as we leave this year and begin a new one, color me skeptical that this club can be saved from the middle with upgrades at the margins. For me, the Canucks’ shortcomings are too intractable.

The quickest way back up, unfortunately, might be dropping in the standings intentionally.

The Canucks cemented the mushy middle in 2022. One hopes that 2023 is the year this club makes a resolution to be something, anything else.

(Top photo of Flames forward Nazem Kadri controlling the puck against Ethan Bear of the Canucks: Candice Ward / USA Today)