The writing was on the wall for Erik Brännström.
The 26-year-old defenceman was a healthy scratch for the Vancouver Canucks even when Quinn Hughes was out of the lineup with an injury. Then, on Saturday night, when the Canucks decided to take Vincent Desharnais out of the lineup, AHL veteran Guillaume Brisebois took the ice in his place, leaving Brännström in the press box.
So, it wasn’t all that surprising to see Brännström placed on waivers on Sunday. It made even more sense when Filip Hronek returned to practice with the Canucks on Monday, suggesting he’ll make his return much sooner than the initial timeline provided by the Canucks.
It’s not the first time a Canuck has returned sooner than expected, which either means the Canucks are rushing players back to the ice or they’re being far more conservative with their timelines than in past seasons. But someone needed to come off the roster to make room for Hronek.
"When you're a puck-moving defenceman, you've also got to defend"
Hronek’s return is the surface reason why Brännström was waived but the Canucks could have easily sent Brisebois down instead. The underlying reason why he was waived and why he had been a repeated healthy scratch is that the coaching staff no longer trusts him defensively.
That’s likely also the reason why Brännström cleared waivers on Monday, allowing the Canucks to send him down to the Abbotsford Canucks in the AHL.
A shutout win on Saturday certainly made it a lot easier to ignore the critics wondering why Brännström wasn’t in the lineup. The Canucks’ defence has struggled to move the puck up ice, making it hard to see why Brännström didn’t get another chance to play.
When asked why Brännström wasn’t playing ahead of Saturday’s game, head coach Rick Tocchet stumbled through an answer, perhaps because he was seeking to explain the scratch without fully throwing Brännström under the bus.
“We’ve been playing a lot of low-event games. We’re struggling to score goals. We feel we’ve got to stay in the game that way,” said Tocchet. “I think when you’re a puck-moving defenceman, you’ve also got to defend. There’s a lot of different things. I think Brise is a good defender. We’ve got Hughes now. I just think the reward-risk part of it is something that we’d rather go this way.”
One could quibble with a few parts of Tocchet’s answer. The fact that the team is struggling to score goals might suggest that adding a puck-moving defenceman to the mix would help rather than hinder your efforts to win. But the issue is that in his most recent games, Brännström wasn’t helping the team score, so there has been no reward to balance out the risk.
Brännström's underlying numbers have cratered
In Brännström’s last 11 games before he was waived, he was on the ice for nine goals against at 5-on-5 and just two goals for, both in the same game against the Detroit Red Wings.
While some of that can be explained by bad luck — Canucks goaltenders had an ugly .868 save percentage behind him at 5-on-5 in those games — most of it is explained by Brännström legitimately struggling. Across those games, Brännström was dead last on the Canucks defence in corsi percentage, shots-for percentage, and expected goals percentage.
With that in mind, it’s pretty easy to understand why Brännström was waived and why no other teams claimed him.
Here’s the things: Brännström was significantly better earlier in the season. If we look at his expected goals percentage (xGF%), a statistic that combines both shot quantity and shot quality, Brännström was one of the Canucks’ best defencemen through the first 20 games of the season. His 52.7% expected goals was second only to Quinn Hughes and Filip Hronek.
But then Brännström’s game fell off a cliff.
Looking at a five-game rolling average of Brännström’s xGF%, the 20-game mark of the season is right around when things starting going wrong. He went from consistently posting an xGF% above 50%, meaning the Canucks were outshooting and out-chancing the opposition when he was on the ice at 5-on-5, to not just below 50% but below 40%.
What happened at that point of the season? Well, the timing happens to be right around when Filip Hronek got injured.
Brännström is not the only defenceman who has struggled
Is Hronek's injury the reason why Brännström started struggling? It’s hard to say. Brännström didn’t play much with Hronek and his primary defence partner remained Vincent Desharnais before and after the injury, so that didn’t change. His minutes didn’t change either; he played about the same amount per game before and after.
But without Hronek, there was more pressure on the rest of the Canucks defence to step up in his absence. It could have also affected momentum and therefore the situations in which Brännström was playing: instead of coming onto the ice with the puck in the offensive zone or under control in a regroup after a dominant shift by Hughes and Hronek, perhaps he was more often playing in the defensive zone after Carson Soucy and Noah Juulsen were pinned down for a long shift.
With Hronek returning, it might have been a good opportunity to keep Brännström around to see if he could get back to the player who played so well for the Canucks earlier in the season.
It’s also worth noting that he wasn’t the only defenceman who has struggled. Here’s the rolling average for the other Canucks’ defencemen compared to Brännström.
It seems likely that Juulsen will be coming out of the lineup with Hronek returning, as his numbers have been as bad or worse than Brännström’s in recent games.
The really concerning player is Carson Soucy, whose underlying numbers have been brutal for most of the season. While his numbers come with the context that he’s playing tougher minutes than Brännström, Soucy’s struggles are one of the biggest reasons why the Canucks’ defence corps as a whole has been underwater this season.
The odds of the Canucks scratching Soucy in favour of Brännström are slim to none, of course.
Will Brännström get another chance for the Canucks?
While Brännström arguably deserved another chance based on his play earlier in the season and the team’s poor play over the last ten games, it’s not hard to understand why the coaching staff felt they couldn’t trust him.
Coaches need to know that a third-pairing defenceman isn’t going to hurt the team. No team is relying on their third pairing to produce offence; they primarily just want them to hold serve in their minutes and prevent the opposition from scoring so that your best players can win the game for you.
That’s the fundamental issue for Brännström: he’s not reliable enough defensively to be a safe option on the third pairing and, when he’s put in a top-four role to take advantage of his offensive upside, he struggles against tougher competition.
The only reason it made any sense at all to put Brännström back into the lineup is the sorry state of the Canucks’ defence corps as a whole. If he couldn’t get into the Canucks’ lineup even when they were missing Hughes, there was little chance of him getting claimed off waivers to play in any other team’s lineup.
For the time being, Brännström is still in the organization and still available to play for the Canucks if and when they have injuries on defence. He's proven that he can be a legitimate NHL defencemen for at least a short stretch of time, even if he fell off after that.
Will he get another chance? That seems unlikely. This coaching staff has made it pretty clear what type of defenceman they prefer.
