With the Canucks’ 23-man roster finalized, a fan’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. Also, the lineup. Sure, the line combinations we see in practice now may not survive the first period of Wednesday’s season opener, if they even last that long, but it’s still intriguing to see what the coaches are thinking.
It looks like one of the things the coaches are thinking is, What the heck do we do with Luca Sbisa?
Global BC’s Jay Janower was at Canucks practice yesterday and tweeted out the line combinations and defence pairings for fans to freak out about. Apart from Brandon Sutter skating on the first line with the Sedins -- which we really need to talk about some other time -- the forward lines make a lot of sense.
Bo Horvat gets the well-deserved opportunity to play as the second line centre between Sven Baertschi and Radim Vrbata. It looks like Jared McCann will be entrusted with the third-line centre role between the Canucks’ best two-way wingers, Alex Burrows and Jannik Hansen. Finally, Adam Cracknell will centre a scrappy fourth line with Brandon Prust, Derek Dorsett, and/or Jake Virtanen manning his wings. That’s all well and good.
It’s the defence pairings that are a complete mess. What is this nonsense?
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Ben Hutton paired alongside Chris Tanev, Alex Edler with Luca Sbisa, Dan Hamhuis/Matt Bartkowski.
— JAY JANOWER (@DOUBLEJGLOBALBC)
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Let’s start with the obvious: why in the world would you ever split up Alex Edler and Chris Tanev, who weren’t just the best defence pairing on the Canucks, but one of the best in the league last season?
Another question: why would you play both Luca Sbisa and Matt Bartkowski on their off-sides when you have Yannick Weber, a right-side defenceman who not only worked very well on a pairing with Dan Hamhuis last season, but was also a vital weapon on the power play?
One more: why would you put your rookie defenceman, who will likely play minimal, sheltered minutes as he’s slowly introduced to the rigors of NHL hockey, with your best defensive defenceman, who needs to play big minutes against the best players on the opposition?
When looking at these questions, it becomes pretty clear what, or rather who, the problem is: it’s Luca Sbisa.
I know I’ll get flak from some corners for being too harsh on Sbisa, so I’ll put a disclaimer here: I really want Sbisa to succeed. I want him to be good. He plays for the team that I like. Watching him play hockey is literally part of my job. Him playing better will make my job more enjoyable.
One of the biggest reasons I want Sbisa to be good is that the Canucks are dead set on him being in the lineup. And really, that’s the issue.
When Luca Sbisa is your fifth defenceman and you have a young, rookie defenceman that you want to introduce into the lineup -- like, say, Ben Hutton -- you have a problem. Even the most ardent Sbisa defender will have to admit that he’s not the steadiest and most reliable defence partner. He’s not the ideal guy to pair with a player who’s just getting his feet wet in professional hockey.
That’s especially true with a guy like Hutton, who is a risk-taker with an aggressive, offensive style. He tends to jump up into the rush and likes to carry the puck deep in the offensive zone. That’s great and exciting, but it’s nerve-wracking as all hell when the defence partner covering for him if something goes wrong is Sbisa.
The fact is, the Canucks don’t know who they want paired with Sbisa. Trevor Linden . He was asked about the play of Sbisa and Bartkowski and, after acknowledging their struggles, Linden was quick to point out reasons for those struggles.
“We worked Matt on both the right and the left side, which is a bit of a challenge,” he said, and that’s a fair point about Bartkowski. They wanted to see how he played on his off-side, and switching between the two game after game can be tough. But when it came to excusing Sbisa’s pre-season play, he had this to say: “Obviously finding the right fit with Luca...we played around with that as well throughout the preseason.”
The implication seemed pretty clear: no one that Sbisa played with in the pre-season was the “right fit.”
So, in practice, Sbisa gets paired with someone entirely new: Alex Edler. They tried Dan Hamhuis last season and that pairing just dragged Hamhuis down, so they’re running out of viable options. At some point you might ask what the common factor is in all of these struggling defence pairings. I mean, you might ask that -- I’m not going to.
In the meantime, Hutton doesn’t have to worry about his confidence getting crushed by playing with Sbisa, but then you have to ask, do you really want to make Hutton overconfident by playing him with Chris Tanev? Tanev will so perfectly cover for Hutton’s every blunder that Hutton will start to think that screwing up is normal.
