Vasily Podkolzin isn’t a lock to be in the opening night lineup and the Daniel Sprong signing reminds us of that
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With each tidy move this summer by Vancouver Canucks GM Patrik Allvin to shore up his corps of forwards, the narrowness of Vasily Podkolzin’s position on the 2024-25 roster has become more and more obvious.
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This weekend’s signing of Daniel Sprong put on an underline beneath Podkolzin’s status.
The fourth-year NHLer is on a $1-million deal this season. That’s a good number for the Canucks, who are more than happy to have a group of handy depth forwards locked down on minimal cap hits.
Beyond Podkolzin and Sprong — who officially inked a one-year, $975,000 deal on the weekend — there’s also newly signed Keifer Sherwood ($1.5-million cap hit), plus holdovers Phil Di Giuseppe ($775,000 cap hit) and Nils Hoglander ($1.1-million cap hit) in the mix.
All those players have their strengths and obvious utility, but for Podkolzin to be in that mix, it’s a bit of a surprise.
He is a first-round pick, after all.
He should be pushing for a spot on one of the top lines, not in a fight for a spot on the fourth line.
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As ESPN analyst Ray Ferraro once said of a different former Canucks first-round pick: when they stop asking you do to more, pretty quickly they start asking you to do less, and that’s a bad place to be.
Podkolzin stands in this precarious spot, although his circumstances are very different from Jake Virtanen’s. Virtanen found himself in this spot because his work ethic was as poor as he understanding of the game. Podkolzin understands the game well and works as hard as anyone, but his instincts have been vaporized. He needs to get back to playing to the instincts that made him the man on so many teams when he was a teen.
Let us recall the player that Podkolzin was when the Canucks drafted him in 2019 — a horse of a forward, a player who forechecked, who played in traffic, who controlled shifts against his peers with strengths and smarts.
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And he was a top leader to boot. He would captain his national U20 squad at the world juniors.
That player has rarely been seen in Vancouver.
There are a few reasons why.
The SKA stall
First of all, there’s the two years post-draft he spent stapled to the end of the bench in Russia.
He was under contract with SKA, the powerhouse of the KHL, owned by state oil company Gazprom and run by some of Vladimir Putin’s favourite oligarchs.
The prestige of being with SKA was huge for the young Russian, but the development reality was always going to be an issue. A young player on a team swimming in money is rarely going to get opportunity, and NHL teams knew that at the 2019 draft and that’s why he slid down to the Canucks at 10th overall.
There were moments for Podkolzin during those two post-draft seasons with SKA, but mostly the young player was handed few opportunities, his development stagnating in a Russian hockey system that has forever favoured the now over the future.
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Young players just have to bide their time.
But age 19 and 20 is a massive developmental window for athletes, a window where you should be allowed to make mistakes and learn from them, rather than simply fear punishment. The fear of punishment turns a player risk-averse, dulling their top-end skills.
And that’s the player who arrived in Vancouver before the 2021 season — obviously adept at sticking to the system, at recognizing the danger of mistakes, but dulled away from the possibilities that come from risk.
Three coaches, two years
Podkolzin’s rookie NHL season was chaos.
Don’t forget he had two head coaches in that season: first Travis Green, who was coaching for his job from almost the get-go, then Bruce Boudreau, who played saviour of the season, even if the performance his team put together was really just a Thatcher Demko-driven paper tiger.
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Under Boudreau, Podkolzin did find his way in the late going — don’t forget he scored 14 goals.
But the next fall, as Boudreau’s Canucks faltered and the coach fell out with management, Podkolzin’s role diminished before being banished to the minors.
A late-season cameo under Rick Tocchet, Boudreau’s replacement, showed that Podkolzin still had promise, but the path forward still demanded more from Podkolzin himself if he were to thrive.
We’re essentially still there.
How to stick
Sprong and Podkolzin are actually intriguing foils in this story. Podkolzin’s game is rounded, with few defensive concerns, but he’s lost his offensive jump. Sprong is all-offensive jump, with a mountain of defensive concern.
What Tocchet and the coaches need to see from Podkolzin isn’t just a player who can do the right thing with the puck — plenty of players can do that. What they need is a player who can do that but also press the issue when he has the puck, a player who will take the puck to the net and take the risk to score a goal, not the player who eschews the risk and simply puts the puck behind the net, creating a forechecking opportunity instead.
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Podkolzin has the talent to be a bigger player than the hard-working teammates around him. If he can’t find a separating skill against them — which would be a massive disappointment — it’s a safe bet he’ll find himself skating on another team.
pjohnston@postmedia.com
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