Provided they're not as hung over as the rest of Vancouver's young people on the day after Halloween, Jared McCann and Jake Virtanen have to be feeling pretty good this morning. The Canucks made their decision regarding the two teenagers Sunday: they can stay.
Much like Bo Horvat's big day last year, the announcement came after a particularly brutal video meeting. According to the Canucks, coach Willie Desjardins showed several clips of the teens making mistakes before Horvat jumped up and welcomed them to the team. (Breaking a player's spirit completely before delivering good news is classic coach humour.)
"They were ripping me so hard, I almost started to cry," McCann said, a pretty big turnaround from his hubristic comment upon scoring for the fifth time in Friday's win: "It leaves no doubts," he said then. Let this be a lesson to you, Jared: there are always doubts in the video room.
And there are doubts regarding McCann. He's struggled in no way to score goals, but Desjardins isn't just making things up when he expresses concern for the centre's defensive game. McCann sports an ugly corsi rating of 40.96% this season. The ice tends to tilt towards the Vancouver end when he's on it (which, come to think of it, makes his goal-scoring even more impressive, since it's all uphill). And Thomas Drance has more, from Canucks Army:
In even-strength situations the Canucks are giving up shots against at a way higher rate with McCann on the ice than they're surrendering with any other forward on the sheet. It isn't even close. Vancouver's opposition is generating over 38 shots per 60 minutes on 5-on-5 ice time, which is a ghastly number. Relative to the performance of the rest of the team, McCann's defensive results by this metric are the third worst among forwards in the NHL so far, according to hockeyanalysis.com.
The Canucks are outscoring the opposition with McCann on the ice at even strength, but that's largely the result of favourable bounces at both ends of the rink (McCann's combined on-ice shooting and save percentage sits at 107.4). Even though McCann's on-ice save percentage is sky high, the Canucks are still surrendering goals against at a very high rate when he's on the ice.
But that's okay. It doesn't matter how good you are: adjusting to the NHL, where everyone is fast, strong, and smart, takes time. But I think we all saw with Bo Horvat last season that it doesn't always have to take a lot of time. McCann will be fine.
As for Virtanen, he has to be breathing an even larger sigh of relief. His defensive game hasn't been quite as suspect (although, as a winger, his miscues aren't quite as glaring), and his physical play has been welcome. Still, he hasn't scored. If five goals is how many it takes to leave almost no doubt, zero goals probably leaves a boatload of doubt.
Although the Canucks have really never acted as though sending Virtanen home was a consideration. He was on this team from day one of training camp.
The big winner here, though, is the Canucks organization. Remember last year, when Linden Vey was pencilled in as the second-line centre because the Canucks had no one else? Now they've got Bo Horvat and Jared McCann, 20 and 19, respectively, both of whom look like future core players. (Also Brandon Sutter is here.) In two short years, the Jim Benning-era Canucks have established a generational succession plan, and stifled talk of the Canucks' window closing by giving us a glimpse of what the next window will look like.
That's the main reason there should have been little doubt about their fate: McCann and Virtanen are much-needed hope for a disillusioned fanbase. They're exciting, flashy, fast, young players that change the dynamic of the team completely. And after their contributions over the season's first month, the organization couldn't very well send them back to junior and expect us to still be excited about this year's team, could they? The 19-year-olds have been the exciting part; we're as pleased as they are that they're sticking around.
