How the Canucks will be held back by Tyler Myers, Oliver Ekman-Larsson problem

The Vancouver Canucks blue line is an issue, which isn’t exactly a novel statement.

Not only has it struggled, but Vancouver’s defense corps also ranks among the NHL’s most expensive units. In a hard-capped league, inefficiency of that magnitude is lethal.

According to data found at CapFriendly.com, the Canucks currently rank fifth among all NHL teams by cap space committed to active defenders — behind only the Colorado Avalanche, Boston Bruins, Nashville Predators and Winnipeg Jets. That ranking doesn’t factor in Tucker Poolman’s $2.5 million contract either, which is currently on long-term injured reserve.

Comparing what Vancouver boasts on their back end with the types of defensemen rostered by the other clubs that spend similarly along the blue line, well, it’s enough to make you dizzy.

It’s hard to fathom how Vancouver’s last management group could possibly have built a blue line this inadequate and overpriced in the first place. Reconstructing the Canucks’ blue line, meanwhile, has been a priority for Patrik Allvin and company in their first cycle with the club, but mostly a hypothetical one to this point. The improvements that have been made — Travis Dermott, Ethan Bear, Riley Stillman — haven’t exactly moved the needle, despite coming at the cost of meaningful futures.

That level and pace of improvement aren’t going to cut it in a just-get-it-done league. Particularly not for a club that entered this season intending to qualify for the playoffs.

Unfortunately there’s no easy fix here, and that’s personified by the struggles endured this season by two of Vancouver’s most experienced (and well-compensated) blueliners: Tyler Myers and Oliver Ekman-Larsson.

Myers and Ekman-Larsson both rank among the top 45 defensemen in the NHL by cap hit, so they’re paid to be true top-pair defenders. And after finding chemistry with each other down the stretch last season — their play as a defense pair was an unsung driver of the short-lived “Bruce there it is” era’s 57-game success — their contributions have fallen well short this season.

Ekman-Larsson in particular has struggled with his mobility at times, taking a significant step back from the classy two-way defensive form that he demonstrated throughout his first Canucks campaign. With Ekman-Larsson on the ice at five-on-five, the club has been outscored by 10 and outchanced by 55.

Myers’ struggles are, perhaps, somewhat less obvious. The Canucks haven’t been outscored with Myers on the ice this season, but the underlying profile is deeply concerning — even if Myers’ ability to squeeze at the blue line and defend in the neutral zone remains solid and useful.

Nevertheless, the Canucks have been outchanced by 76 with Myers on the ice, and his plus-5 rating and even five-on-five goal differential are almost entirely a product of him sharing the ice with a bunch of elite finishers converting at an astounding clip — rather than a reflection of his individual contributions.

In fact, among all regular Canucks defenders, the club is surrendering scoring chances, expected goals and shots against at a higher clip with Myers on the ice than they’re surrendering with any regular defender this season aside from Stillman.

To reiterate the point, the issue isn’t just that Myers and Ekman-Larsson have struggled — both individually and as a defense pair — it’s that they’ve struggled to this extent while eating up $13.26 million in cap space and earning $15.5 million in combined salary this season.

To put the level of inefficiency the Canucks are dealing with in perspective, I figured I’d utilize The Athletic‘s player cards, which are compiled by Dom Luszczyszyn and Shayna Goldman using Luszczyszyn’s Game Score Value Added metric. Those cards contain a market value assessment (which you can read more about here), which includes a monetary measurement of each NHL player’s “surplus value” provided relative to their salary.

I crunched the numbers for every single defense pair in the NHL that’s played together for at least 245 minutes this season, and Myers and Ekman-Larsson score out as far and away the NHL’s. least Efficient high-usage pair. Here are the bottom five:

There’s no pair in the league that’s even in the same inefficiency stratosphere as Myers and Ekman-Larsson.

It should go without saying that an NHL team simply cannot win games in this league consistently with a top-four pair providing $14 million in negative value. That’s the sort of wound that even Monty Python’s Black Knight would readily admit is painful.

What’s most concerning about Myers and Ekman-Larsson’s decline in form this season is the worrisome probability that this isn’t structural, or bad cluster luck, or a product of being asked to do too much on a poor team.

Myers will turn 33 in a few weeks’ time and is signed through next season, while Ekman-Larsson will turn 32 this upcoming summer and is signed through 2027. They both rank among the 50 oldest blueliners in the NHL. In a league that’s getting younger and faster every single year, there’s a high likelihood that we’ve already seen their best hockey in a Canucks uniform.

Which makes this an issue that’s somewhat intractable, as does the fact that Myers has a limited no-trade clause (although he’s due a $5 million signing bonus this summer, which should enhance his mobility on the trade market once it’s paid) while Ekman- Larsson’s deal includes a full no-move clause. Any deals they’re involved in will have to be three-dimensional, if they’re even possible at all — an open question with the upper limit of the salary cap currently projected to be flat for one more cycle.

Elsewhere, Canucks management is staring down the barrel of a ton of key expiring contracts over the next 18 months, with players that will require substantial raises to retain — Bo Horvat, Andrei Kuzmenko and Elias Pettersson among them — while continuing to insist that they intend to turn this club around in a hurry. If it’s possible at all, and I’m highly skeptical, the whole ball game is going to come down to whether this club can successfully shed, or navigate around, their expensive, aging, struggling blueliners.

In the short term anyway, this team isn’t going to significantly improve unless they can get both cheaper and better all at once on the back end, which is all but impossible to achieve without significant blue line prospects pushing for NHL jobs — something Vancouver almost entirely lacks.

This is one of those items that requires an organization to take a step back and be deeply honest with itself in sketching out a path forward. While both Ekman-Larsson and Myers are quality professionals who could potentially help a winning team in depth roles, as long as they remain on the books with their current contracts playing at this level the Canucks aren’t going to sniff the playoffs — not solely. Because of their individual contributions, but also because of the options for improvement that their presence on the club’s cap sheet removes off the table.

This is one of the main reasons why taking an intentional step back in the short term — and monetizing just about everything with value over the age of 25 — is probably this franchise’s only meaningful path back to contention this decade.

(Top photo of Tyler Myers: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)