Are the Vancouver Canucks Underrated?
Vancouver has the lowest Stanley Cup odds of any team not in a 2-0 hole. But is that deserved?
Looking at the NHL playoff landscape according to my Stanley Cup odds, it’s clear that this year’s championship race remains as wide-open as ever. Six of the eight remaining teams are crowded between a 10% and 20% chance to win the Cup, and one of the exceptions is the Carolina Hurricanes, who just went down 2-0 in their series against the New York Rangers. (Teams down 2-0 in the NHL tend to lose 86% of the time, so Carolina’s 7.8% Cup odds can be explained.)
But the other exception is the Vancouver Canucks, who check in barely ahead of Carolina at 7.9% in the meta-forecast. Vancouver isn’t in a 2-0 hole; it hasn’t even started its second-round series versus the Edmonton Oilers, as a matter of fact. And yet, the Canucks are being treated like one of the biggest longshots in the field.
Do they deserve it, though?
During the regular season, Vancouver ranked sixth in Hockey-Reference’s Simple Rating System (SRS), which adjusts a team’s goals-per-game differential for strength of schedule — ahead of the Rangers, Colorado Avalanche and Boston Bruins, all of whom have substantially better Cup odds at the moment.
(By the way, want more evidence of how stacked the remaining playoff field is? The eight surviving teams were all among the Top 9 in SRS — the only missing team from the Top 8 being the Winnipeg Jets, who ran up against a historic offensive buzzsaw with Colorado in Round 1.)
Vancouver also had the makeup of a top championship contender during the regular season. Their best player by Goals Above Replacement, defenseman Quinn Hughes, ranked seventh in the league with 26.5 GAR, and he was joined by two other teammates (C J.T. Miller and G Thatcher Demko) above 20 GAR. C Elias Pettersson (18.4) and RW Brock Boeser (17.1) rounded out a group of five Canucks with at least 15 GAR this year.
Based on my research into the construction of Stanley Cup-winning rosters, this gives Vancouver a lot more top-end talent than the typical champ from recent history:
In fact, since 1980 (when the NHL expanded to a 16-team playoff bracket), the 2023-24 Canucks are one of just 16 teams to make Round 2 of the playoffs with a roster that met the following criteria:
At least one 25+ GAR player
At least three 20+ GAR players
At least five 15+ GAR players
Of the 14 teams from before this season, six of them won the Stanley Cup (most recently being the Avalanche in 2022), one more made the Finals but lost and another went deep into the conference finals. Teams built like these Canucks tend to do well in the postseason.
Now, there are two problems with Vancouver that I suspect feed a lot into their surprisingly low title odds. The first is that another team fitting our list of criteria above is the 2023-24 Edmonton Oilers, who happen to be paired up with Vancouver in the second round starting tonight. Led by Connor McDavid, Edmonton has even more star power than Vancouver does; they also have a lot more playoff experience and they had a better regular-season SRS. The oddsmakers like the Oilers in this series, and that puts a cap on the Canucks’ chances to win the championship down the road.
The other issue is that Demko continues to be out with a knee injury, robbing Vancouver of one of the players who fed into the team’s high level of star power. Demko was the league’s second-best netminder by GAR during the regular season and was named a finalist for the Vezina Trophy as the NHL’s best goalie.
Certainly, Demko going down hurts the Canucks. But perhaps the effect of his loss is being overstated. It should be noted that obscure second-year stand-in Arturs Silovs, starting in place of both Demko and regular backup Casey DeSmith, ranks fourth in Goals Saved Above Average this postseason with a save percentage 34% better than league average.
It’s a lot to ask a goalie with 9 previous games of NHL experience (including zero in the playoffs) to stop McDavid and company cold. But playing in front of a defence corps that ranked 4th in GAR during the regular season, Silovs has help. And if he does any kind of Demko impersonation, we may find that the Canucks were being badly overlooked heading into the second round.
Filed under: NHL
Neil, well played! Having followed hockey for only the past 5 seasons, I so appreciate you covering it so well and in such depth. So many analytically focused sources largely ignore hockey. Content such as this adds so much to observers of the sport like myself. Tremendous work.
Not to jinx it, but looking good...