2 weeks Ago By Patrick Johnston
The instinct with small defencemen, of course, is that they struggle to defend big players. But then you watch the game, and you realize this isn’t exactly the case. Take Erik Brännström, the skilled defenceman picked up in a trade by the Vancouver Canucks on the eve of the season from the Colorado Avalanche.
Brännström, simply put, just isn’t that tall. “Footy showed me a clip today where (Brännström) had a bigger guy at the net and he boxed the guy out. I mean, if he can do that, he’s going to stay in the lineup,” Canucks head coach Rick Tocchet said Friday, after a practice at the University of B.
C. “I just think he’s improved every game.” Brännström got his shot because Derek Forbort is on personal leave.
His first game against the Florida Panthers was middling — understandable for a player still in the early stages of learning the team’s system — but in games two and three, in Philadelphia and Chicago, his smart plays under pressure, both carrying the puck out of danger and also finding teammates with nifty passes, started to stand out. Brännström spent the past six seasons with the Ottawa Senators, tantalizing often with those puck skills, but never quite becoming the big-time, top-end defenceman the Senators hoped he’d be. Ottawa could have made him a qualifying offer after last season, but chose not to.
Rejected by Ottawa, he ended up signing in Colorado for a lot less than he’d made in Ottawa. Needless to say, he didn’t expect the team that had signed him in the summer would trade him so quickly — it was a summer of reality checks for Brännström. “Roller-coaster of emotions, for sure,” he said, but now he seems to have landed in a place where he’s wanted.
“It was tough,” he said of being cast aside in Ottawa. “It’s pretty weird not to got back there after all these years. But I think it was time for me to go somewhere else.
I think my game can explode more somewhere else.” He thought that would be in Colorado, but he’s just as happy it now seems to be happening for him in Vancouver. “I’ve been feeling really good these three games.
It’s a lot of fun,” he said. It’s taking time to adjust to the Canucks’ system, which, under Tocchet and assistant coach Adam Foote, is pretty complicated, but he very much likes the concept. It’s certainly proving to be a lot more offensively oriented than in Ottawa.
“We play a really fun style of hockey,” he said. The fact he’s a puck-mover, a guy who can make smart plays with the puck, has always been obvious. He’s winning over his coach’s trust with those talents too.
“There’s about two or three times the last game where he skated out of trouble, you know, he just didn’t throw it off the glass. There was a couple windows for him to skate it out. He did,” Tocchet said.
Then he made a comparison that puts Brännström in solid company. “You know how Hughes can do it a lot? I think (Brännström) has a little bit of that in him,” the head coach said. So far, Brännström has skated on a pairing with Vincent Desharnais, a sizing odd-couple that even Brännström, listed generously at 5-foot-10, had to laugh about.
“I was standing on the bench during the anthem and I was between Vinny and (Tyler) Myers. Yeah they’re tall. I feel even smaller than I actually am,” he said.
The big question is what happens when Forbort returns. The Canucks do have the cap space to keep Brännström on the NHL roster so that’s not an issue: it’s simply a question of filling positions on the game sheet. Forbort shoots left.
Brännström shoots left. Generally coaches don’t like to swap lefties over to the right side. But Brännström has shown himself adept on the right side.
And as Tocchet noted, the data he’s seen backs the idea of swapping Brännström to the right. “That’s something we could experiment with,” the coach said. pjohnston@postmedia.
com.
