Starting the season with injuries puts a team behind the proverbial 8-ball, just ask the 2024-’25 Vancouver Canucks.
Or as Sportsnet reporter Iain MacIntyre points out in the video below, the new long term ankle injury to Canucks forward Nils Hoglander is a stark reminder of last season’s start.
“It’s not just that Hoglander is going to be out for two months, maybe more, it’s that it’s going to be an imperfect start again,” ‘Imac’ pointed out. “The line-up is not going to be at full strength, and the problem last year, from the very start, day one of training camp, is when Thatcher Demko did an interview with us and had no idea when he was going to play. By then we had the news that Dakota Joshua had cancer and was going to miss the start. What we didn’t know; J.T. Miller was already hurt.”
Add that to a dysfunctional dressing room and the club was off to a not-so-roaring start.
Down the road in Seattle, the Kraken are missing five regulars, and although two or three of them are listed as day-to-day, those players have missed some or all of training camp under new head coach Lane Lambert. Plus, they’re not that deep of a club in the first place.
The Kraken might be this year’s example of what happened to the Canucks last season, without of course, the dressing room drama.
“When the injuries start to multiply, especially early on, it makes it really difficult to get traction out of the gate, and this is a team (the Canucks) that needs traction out of the gate,” Imac concluded.
One injury does not a rash make, and the team has to hope Hoglander is the only preseason casualty.
Fortunately their most important asset, Demko, appears to be one hundred percent healthy. That’s the starting point. Plus he’ll be playing behind what should be one of the best and deepest D-corps in the NHL. One that includes at least one young player.
The Canucks are projected as a playoff team, seemingly with good chemistry on and off the ice.
Injuries can’t be an excuse, but they are a reality. The Canucks need to be lucky and avoid a bug.
