Previewing the slumping Abbotsford Canucks’ weekend series against the San Jose Barracuda

Do you want to know just how bad the Canucks’ power play has been in Abbotsford? The club scored five power play goals over 18 opportunities across their recent three-game road trip, and their power play still ranks dead last in the AHL.

On the contrary, the Canucks killed off 12 of 14 penalties, which bumped their PK to third-best in the AHL!

Ya win some, ya lose some!

League Stats

On the bright side to all of this 2024 losing, the Canucks are outshooting their opposition…granted, a lot of that has to do with score effects and playing from behind, but hey, until the AHL provides those stats league-wide, let’s pretend that doesn’t matter!

Through painstaking gamecenter event tracking, the Canucks have outshot their opposition 398 to 390 at 5-on-5 with the game tied.

Division Standings

Scoring Leaders

We’re getting to a point in the season where the chasm between Arshdeep Bains’ lead as a scoring leader has become so wide that we will have to either leave him off or switch to a boring Excel table to fit the data onto CanucksArmy. His 13-point lead over second-place Sheldon Dries is the biggest gap in the AHL between teams’ first and second-leading scorers. Only the Grand Rapids Griffins’ Jonatan Berggren and Taro Hirose have a wider disparity between them as their team’s number one and number two, with 12 points separating them.

Vasily Podkolzin crept up the all-situations scoring leaderboard with five points over the weekend, while Bain and Max Sasson were not too far behind, scoring four points each over the club’s last three games. The busy scoring weekend for the youth nearly saw a five-way tie for second place in the team, scoring 25 points.

With Mark Friedman’s loan to Abbotsford having expired, his hilarious .75 5v5 points per game leave our PPG tracker. Bains and Sasson sit tied above a half-point per game pace, with Bains having the edge due to maintaining his 5v5 production over five more games than Sasson (38 to 33 GP).

The last three games in California were not kind to the club’s on-ice numbers for 5v5 goalscoring. On the whole, Abbotsford has outscored their opposition at 5-on-5 with most of their regulars in the lineup. Alex Kannok Leipert’s gaudy minus-10 goal differential at 5-on-5 does require the asterisk that the majority of action against has come with him playing off-role as a fourth-line winger or fourth-line center. Marc Gatcomb’s minus-10 differential is salvaged, if only slightly, because he’s factored in the scoring on four of the five goals scored with him on the ice at 5-on-5. Still, not ideal for a bottom-six energy player.

Injury Report

Transactions

Games 41 & 42 versus San Jose Barracuda

Amazingly, this is the first time these Pacific Division rivals face off this season.

Like their parent club in the NHL, the Barracuda have struggled to find wins this season. Their 13 wins are second only to the Bridgeport Islanders for the fewest in the AHL. Additionally, their 21 regulation losses are tops of the Pacific Division. Despite ranking highly in total goals and goals for per game, relative to the league, their 3.73 goals against per game ranks dead last in the AHL. Their second-worst penalty kill in the AHL is playing a major factor in that, which has conceded 41 goals over 165 times spent shorthanded.

Like Abbotsford, the Barracuda are high-volume shooters, converting at a high clip (10.2%), but are getting below-average goaltending from their platoon of Eetu Makiniemi, Magnus Chrona, and Georgia Romanov. All three netminders have save percentages of .895 or lower and goals-against-averages above 3.4.

If the Canucks have tapped into something with Podkolzin as the power play triggerman—as shown by his three power play goals and four power play points this past weekend—then they could feast here this weekend.

They might head into next week, NOT dead last in the AHL by power play percentage for the first time in several weeks.

Week 17 Predictions 

Given how poorly the Canucks have done lately, I’m going to curb the enthusiasm and predict that they lose one in overtime and win one in regulation in very high-scoring affairs.