Why Canucks don’t measure up to Utah, and what it should mean for the rebuild

SALT LAKE CITY — Under a rash of galling defensive errors, the Vancouver Canucks lost decisively, 6-2, to the upstart Utah Mammoth on Monday night.

It was a game punctuated by Canucks own goals and coverage errors. A game in which Vancouver easily could’ve been down 4-1 after 20 minutes, but was bailed out by some excellent cross-crease saves from Kevin Lankinen, and an inexplicable Dylan Guenther power-play miss with the net almost entirely vacated, the result of some clever east-west puck movement from the Mammoth.

Despite those bad bounces, by the end of the second period, as former Canucks defender Ian Cole worked the clock, the Canucks found themselves buried anyway. Submerged by a deluge of battles lost, assignments missed and a pair of deflections off Vancouver defenders into their own net.

On a night in which the Canucks’ moms were in attendance, the club played dismal defensive hockey. Vancouver looked both overmatched and completely overwhelmed. And the difficulty was even further underlined when Filip Chytil left the game after the second period. Canucks head coach Adam Foote said that Chytil had “tweaked” something, but wouldn’t rule out a head injury when asked, saying only “I hope not,” in response to The Athletic’s follow-up queries on Chytil’s status.

The Canucks and the Mammoth are two teams headed in opposite directions. Utah is probably the sixth most talented overall side in the Western Conference at this juncture, and should be a heavy favourite to emerge as the first wild-card team at the conclusion of the regular season. The Mammoth have the pace and scoring depth to be a troublesome first-round opponent for either Vegas or Edmonton, and there’s a sense that they’re just getting started.

There’s a relevant benchmark worth dwelling on in analyzing where Utah sits today in comparison to the distance that the Canucks will have to travel in the years ahead to emerge once again as a sturdy, playoff-level side. Or even better, a legitimate Stanley Cup contender, which is not a label I’d bestow on the Mammoth (for what it’s worth, the bookmakers agree, given that Utah is currently priced out at 45-to-one odds to win the Stanley Cup in the outrights marketplace).

That the Mammoth are a good team, but a work in progress with distance still to travel to morph into a true contender, makes them an interesting measuring stick for the Canucks. Where Utah sits today isn’t where the Canucks will aspire to be at the conclusion of their nascent rebuilding effort, but the gap between these two sides is an absolute chasm. One that’s far more likely than not to widen further over the medium-term due to some grave structural realities that the Canucks must begin to identify and grapple with.

Utah, after all, has been red hot across the past two months, despite being without its brightest young star forward, Logan Cooley, who sustained a knee injury in a game against Vancouver in early December. Cooley appeared to be on his way to a breakout campaign, and his return — he’s now skating in a non-contract jersey, and seems likely to be back after the Olympic break — will deepen a Utah offensive attack that absolutely requires his skill and pace to perform at the level of a side with Cinderella potential entering the playoffs.

Between Cooley, 21, Dylan Guenther, 22, and J.J. Peterka, 24, all of whom are already signed to long-term contracts, the Mammoth have several young, high-quality offensive forwards with locked-in cost control and significant runway to build around.

Think about it this way. Liam Öhgren scored for Vancouver on Monday night and was a genuine bright spot in a tough game for the Canucks. He’s performed well and is doing some really fun stuff both as a counterattacking power forward and as a disruptive forechecking presence. The 22-year-old winger looks like a real find as a tertiary piece of the package that Vancouver got from the Minnesota Wild for Quinn Hughes.

But for as good as Öhgren is, and as exciting and as much potential as he possesses, he’s produced eight points in 25 Canucks games and is the same age as Guenther, who has 24 goals and 46 points in 54 games this season.

Öhgren could be a part of the solution in Vancouver, but the calibre of difference-maker that Vancouver is going to require to make up the gap that a non-contending team like Utah has already opened up is of an entirely different magnitude and volume than anything that’s currently on the Canucks roster or in their system.

It will take years for the Canucks to accumulate and develop the cornerstones of the quality that Utah already has in its lineup, and that’s something that the Canucks have to process and really dwell on.

Because it’s not just about that trio. Guenther, Cooley and Peterka are wildly impressive and productive, but they aren’t even the team’s leading scorers. Utah’s pair of 50-point forwards, U.S. Olympian Clayton Keller and forward Nick Schmaltz — who scored a hat trick and stirred the drink for the Mammoth against Vancouver on Monday — are in their late 20s, and come attached to far less cost certainty.

Schmaltz, in particular, is a pending unrestricted free agent. The skilled, versatile playmaking forward is poised to be among the most expensive forwards on the free-agent market this summer. The Mammoth, in short order, will have a key decision to make on Schmaltz.

That’s the business of the game, especially in the cap era. What’s most important to note, for now, isn’t how Utah will choose to proceed with Schmaltz, or what level of risk it’s willing to take on in signing him to what’s sure to be a massive extension given the market dynamic of the NHL’s current growth-oriented cap environment, but how well the Mammoth are positioned for either scenario.

Because it’s not just about the fact that Utah is better than Vancouver today. It’s how durable the Mammoth’s advantage is likely to be, given these structural advantages.

Utah has a better, younger roster right now, and beneath the NHL level, it also has better prospects, both in terms of high-end players and overall organizational depth. As excited as Canucks fans are about the likes of Braeden Cootes, Tom Willander and Zeev Buium, Utah has prospects like Caleb Desnoyers, Tij Iginla, Daniil But and Dmitri Simashev, none of whom were even playing for the Mammoth on Monday night.

While the Canucks have added some draft capital by trading Hughes and Kiefer Sherwood over the past eight weeks, Utah currently owns three additional second-round picks and two additional third-rounders over the next two years, so the Mammoth even have them matched in this arena.

Vancouver, meanwhile, will enter this offseason with about $15 million in cap space as it stands today. Utah projects to have nearly double that amount.

It’s easy to focus on the high-flying Anaheim Ducks and Macklin Celebrini’s stunning Hart Trophy-worthy level at 19 in San Jose in thinking through what challenges Vancouver will have to navigate in the years ahead if this rebuilding effort goes well. Those are the young opponents that lurk in the Pacific Division, after all, on the other end of this stretch of dominance that Vegas and Edmonton have enjoyed.

The fundamental advantages that Utah has over Vancouver, however, in terms of draft capital, prospect depth, cap flexibility and young NHL stars signed to long-term contracts likely to age well in an era of projected cap growth are in some ways more instructive. Those edges, after all, are multifaceted, kinetic and overwhelming.

They distill all the areas of hockey value in which the Canucks’ holdings fall not just short, but woefully short. They hint at the problem facing this organization, a critical lack of value, and the significant gravity of that issue.

When you really look at it and process it, not just in terms of Monday’s result, but in terms of how the gap between these franchises is likely to widen over the next three-to-five seasons, the conclusion it should rationally lead the Canucks to is that it’s not remotely enough to proceed conventionally with their rebuilding effort.

No, what the Canucks require is altogether more dramatic and nuanced. It’s a proactive value resuscitation exercise, the extent of which current Canucks leadership may not be capable of even conceiving of, much less communicating to a skeptical market and actually executing.

The Olympic roster freeze will hit on Wednesday, and the trade deadline arrives on March 6. Let that be a test of whether or not Canucks president Jim Rutherford and general manager Patrik Allvin have a sense of the depths of Vancouver’s crisis, and the sort of remedies required to resuscitate the value of the team’s hockey holdings over a multiyear horizon.

It will be woefully insufficient, for example, for the Canucks to simply manufacture a market for Evander Kane and net some mid-round picks for other pending unrestricted free agents like Teddy Blueger and David Kämpf.

What the Canucks require to get back on track must transcend attachment to current players on the roster — even, and perhaps especially, Vancouver’s best players — and it must dispense with the sort of internal politics and ass-covering that this organization can no longer afford (and never really could in the first place). Forget the on-ice performance for now, it’s off the ice that matters.

To get to where Vancouver needs to go, the Canucks, to put it simply, must stop doing business the way the Canucks typically have.