The Canucks’ lineup has been relatively fixed for an extended stretch of games lately, which is unusual on Canada’s West Coast – as Canucks fans know.
On Wednesday night against the Sharks, Tyler Motte sustained an injury on a cheap hit by San Jose defender Erik Karlsson, described with uncharacteristic but warranted shade by the Canucks as “a non-penalized hit” on Twitter. Motte has been sent home to Vancouver for further evaluation, according to Canucks general manager Jim Benning, by way of TSN 1040 reporter and The Athletic podcast host Jeff Paterson.
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To provide added depth ahead of a back-to-back set of afternoon games against the Islanders and the Hurricanes this weekend, the Canucks have called up a pair of wingers in Zack MacEwen and Justin Bailey from the AHL, as first reported by The Athletic contributor Rick Dhaliwal. The club also announced that Motte has been placed on injured reserve, facilitating the space on Vancouver’s 23-man roster to complete Thursday’s transactions and ensuring that he won’t return on this current road trip.
With Motte on IR, the Canucks will be without a regular penalty killer and a winger who has made Vancouver’s fourth line playable in matchup minutes. It’s not an insignificant loss, despite Motte’s meagre counting stats haul of three goals and five points in 24 appearances for the Canucks this season. The underlying profile is still inauspicious, but Motte has had a positive impact across the board on both teammates with whom he’s played at least 100 even strength minutes this season, Tim Schaller and Jay Beagle.
That matches the eye test. Without Motte’s speed off the wall, Vancouver’s fourth line just hasn’t been disruptive enough to limit the damage when facing the top-six matchups that coach Travis Green tends to feed them.
It’ll be interesting to see how, or whether, Green adjusts deployment-wise in the short term. Conceivably the Canucks could replace Motte with Schaller on a fourth line that would also feature Beagle and Brandon Sutter and continue to try to use a defensive-oriented bottom-six line to create a more favourable environment for the lines centred by Adam Gaudette and Elias Pettersson. That approach, which has razor-thin margins anyway, has tended to become wholly impractical when Motte has been out of the lineup to this point in the season, however.
Which turns our attention to the recall of Bailey and MacEwen, a pair of players who Benning admitted he was eager to see get a look at the NHL level in a conversation with The Athletic early last week:
A guy like Justin Bailey — he has three hat tricks in his last four games! I went down to Utica when we were in Buffalo last weekend to see him play and he had a hat trick. I’d like to get him some games, get a look at him. He’s worked hard and he’s earned some games.
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Zack MacEwen, the games he’s played, he doesn’t look out of place. He looks like he’s ready to play in the NHL.
MacEwen has appeared in eight games with the Canucks this season, managing a goal and three points in eight games. His scoring rate has fallen off what he managed over the past couple of seasons on a deeper Utica Comets team this year, as he has 11 points in 20 games played.
While playing in the NHL, MacEwen’s underlying profile over a small eight-game sample hasn’t been pretty, but there’s some crucial context to note: he spent the majority of those eight games getting buried against top-of-the-lineup competition while skating with Bo Horvat and J.T. Miller at the height of Vancouver’s bottom-six centre injury crisis in late November. It’s possible MacEwen’s contributions look significantly different in a more traditional fourth-line role, although there’s nothing traditional about the way Green prefers to use his fourth line.
Bailey, on the other hand, is an interesting case. The 24-year-old forward, a 2013 second-round pick of the Sabres, has been on an absolute tear in the AHL over the past month – recording three hat-tricks over the course of an astonishing four-game stretch. He’s third among Comets forwards in points per game rate, with 40 points in 45 games. A big-bodied winger, Bailey is a high-end skater and has appeared in 63 games in his NHL career, recording five goals and nine points during stints with the Sabres and Flyers.
Since the start of the 2016-17 season, Bailey has spent over 500 minutes in 5-on-5 situations and has fared poorly across the board by the underlying numbers. As a highly touted prospect in the Sabres organization, Bailey received a few opportunities in the top six and might have been a bit miscast. In all, he spent over 200 minutes playing as a winger with Jack Eichel and Ryan O’Reilly over the course of the 2016-17 and 2017-18 seasons and struggled in those minutes; he didn’t fare too much better in a more traditional energy-type role with the Flyers last season.
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In both MacEwen and Bailey’s case, they offer the Canucks credible NHL depth and should be serviceable in a limited role. There’s not much in their NHL or AHL track records that’s suggests either forward possesses untapped top-nine upside and it will certainly be interesting to track how they fare if they’re utilized on a Canucks fourth line that tends to get thrown into the fire against top-six matchups with zeal and discipline.
It’s possible that the Canucks will have to mix it up a bit matchup-wise, perhaps utilizing the Pettersson line more frequently against top-six quality matchups at even strength.
Reading between the lines of Vancouver’s decision to call up two players when they already have an extra forward on the 23-man roster poses another interesting question. During Wednesday night’s game against the Sharks, Beagle left for a stretch during the second period, ultimately returning in the third to contribute an assist on a key insurance marker to give Vancouver a two-goal lead. Beagle missed some time earlier this season with what was widely believed to be a core injury and has eaten more than his share of pucks in recent games – including two Colton Parayko slappers on the same shift against the Blues on Monday night.
It’s most likely that the Canucks wanted a pair of extra bodies up front for some insurance with a condensed set of four games in six days beginning on Saturday afternoon. The additional call-up is certainly worth noting, though, especially considering that Beagle did leave Wednesday’s game for a spell.
(Photo: Jeff Vinnick / NHLI via Getty Images)