How Quinn Hughes accomplished everything in the Canucks’ first win and why that shouldn’t be necessary

It was a tense, exciting game and the Vancouver Canucks emerged from the competition with two points.

No, it wasn’t an impressionistic painting and it wasn’t particularly compelling, but what Vancouver’s 3-2 overtime win over the Florida Panthers lacked in aesthetic appeal it made up for in how hard-fought it was.

The Panthers, the reigning Stanley Cup champions, play an aggressive, pressure-based game. They don’t give a quarter.

No matter who is missing from the Panthers’ lineup – and the Panthers were without all-world center Aleksander Barkov and superstar winger Matthew Tkachuk on Thursday night – space is at a premium when visiting South Florida. Every square centimeter of ice is hotly contested.

In that environment, and battling the ghosts of slow starts in the past and the naturally increasing pressure they applied, the Canucks were able to handle that pressure and managed to get better as the game went on Thursday night at Amerant Bank Arena. Vancouver’s third-period push was impressive, a departure from what Vancouver had shown us in three inconsistent performances in the first week of the season.

Kevin Lankinen once again showed an above-average performance in goal. The Canucks’ skaters avoided the big mistakes that had cost them in previous games. And Vancouver’s best players made the difference and won the game.

JT Miller’s contributions make him the obvious headliner. He scored the winning goal in overtime by racing down the right wing and making a mistake to beat a set Sergei Bobrovsky with a deadly wrist shot. It was another meaningful goal in a big moment for Miller, a milestone that will give the entire team some relief when they arrive in Philadelphia on Friday.

Even Elias Pettersson, who received harsh criticism for his vanishing production and is now national history, turned in his best performance of the season. Pettersson hit a crossbar and made furious substitutions while appearing to find some chemistry with his new linemates Conor Garland and Nils Höglander.

But make no mistake, this was the Quinn Hughes show.

Hughes scored his first goal of the season with a confident second try in Vancouver’s first win, but his impact on Thursday night was total.

He was by far the most influential skater in the game, the other nine skaters and the puck in orbit around gravity, so he managed every shift with clean breaks, quick takeaways, creativity and an exceptionally high volume of shots – most of them far higher value -Looks than most defenders assume.

Hughes and his defensive partner Filip Hronek even managed to switch the play high up in the offensive zone on several occasions, always creating excellent looks. That’s a space that Hughes and Hronek have struggled to get over the last 50 or so games, considering how focused Canucks opponents have been on denying it.

Being so effective on Thursday night against a team as strong as the Panthers means a very good evening at the office for Vancouver’s top duo.

In fact, for most of the evening, it looked like the Panthers and Canucks were playing two separate games at the same time. There was the game when Hughes was on the ice and the game when he wasn’t on the ice.

With Hughes on the ice, the game was nearing the end of the Panthers’ rink, and Bobrovsky needed to be sharp in those minutes – and that was the case tonight. However, when Hughes wasn’t on the ice, the Canucks produced very little, the Panthers forecheck played out, and the rest of the contest moved to the Vancouver end of the rink.

All’s well that ends well, and on Thursday night Vancouver held its own in the non-Hughes minutes. In fact, Jesper Boqvist scored the only five-on-five goal the Canucks conceded against Vancouver’s top pair. Aside from the scoreboard, however, Vancouver’s first win of the season underscored how much, perhaps too much, this Canucks team relied on Hughes’ brilliance earlier this season.

Consider that with Hughes on the ice at even strength, Vancouver outshot the Panthers by a ratio of two to one (18 to nine), with Hughes personally hitting eight of those shots. In all other minutes, the shot count had an 18-11 advantage for Florida.

This is a continuation of a trend that continued through Vancouver’s first four games. While Vancouver has had a 19-point lead with Hughes on the ice so far this season, it’s been a whopping 27 points without him. Aside from Hughes and Hronek, there is no Vancouver defenseman in the black on goal difference this season.

Hughes’ absolute influence on the Vancouver Games environment is felt at every stage. When Hughes is on the ice, the club produces shots at an elite rate, but without him it produces shots at the worst rate in the league. Vancouver rarely takes its shots when Hughes is on the ice. Their shot rate exceeds the best lockdown defense team in hockey, but has the profile of a free-flowing bottom-five defense in his absence.

This influence even shows up on an individual level among Vancouver’s forwards. On Thursday night, Vancouver prevailed nine to two with Miller on the ice and seven to two with Pettersson on the ice, in the minutes both forwards shared with Hughes. However, Vancouver held a 10-3 advantage when Miller was on the ice in front of Hughes and 4-2 in Pettersson’s solo minutes.

This season it’s the same storyline. Vancouver’s two top-six centre-backs are outscored by Hughes by a margin of two to one and will beat their opponents to victory when supported by the duo of Hronek and Hughes.

When the samples are so small early in the season, when the split is so extreme, and when a team isn’t quite getting going yet, you’ll often find surprising usage patterns. For Hughes, this shows in his recorded minutes.

In four games, the Canucks captain is averaging 27:15 per game, which puts him second in the NHL behind Nashville Predators star Roman Josi. The gap between Hughes and Josi’s minutes is small (four seconds per game), but there is a contextual gap that is larger.

While both Josi’s Predators and Hughes’ Canucks struggled in the early going, Vancouver’s problems are in line with expectations, whereas the Predators’ problems were far more significant. Astonishingly, the Predators trailed Vancouver by 90 minutes longer in just four games. Adjusted for the game’s script, Hughes can probably be considered the most used player in the NHL entering the 2024-25 season.

Of course, this raises questions of sustainability. If Hughes has to play this often and perform this well for Vancouver to win, what does that mean for the Canucks as the season progresses?

There is also the question of how to fix the problem internally. Does the club need to consider parting ways with Hughes and Hronek if this dynamic continues? Can Tocchet and assistant coach Adam Foote, who leads the defense, better read Vancouver’s fullbacks and help them find solutions and find a way out of their own goal more reliably?

Finally, the big question is what external solutions the club will look for, perhaps sooner than we might reasonably expect, given how aggressively Jim Rutherford and Patrik Allvin have tinkered with this lineup during their tenure in Vancouver. It should be recalled that Canucks management promptly dealt for Mark Friedman when Akito Hirose and Noah Juulsen struggled in Vancouver’s second game of the year last season, a game the club won to expand their options for the third pair to increase.

Whatever the case, the Canucks should have enough talent to win games with the engine running at full speed. However, to get where this team wants to go, they need to find a way to crank up a few more.

(Photo: Carmen Mandato/Getty Images)