Another bad news hit the Vancouver Canucks: the head coach has shed painful tears due to Elias Lindholm’s decision.
The Vancouver Canucks made a strong push for forward Elias Lindholm in January, offering the Calgary Flames a sizable package that included many choices and prospects in addition to winger Andrei Kuzmenko.
For many years, Lindholm was a top-six forward with consistent production who could play anywhere in the lineup for Vancouver. Being among the best team in the league since the puck dropped in October, the Canucks saw a chance to bolster their forward corps beyond Elias Pettersson and co.
There’s just one issue: Lindholm’s versatility hasn’t quite fit in. Not quite yet, anyhow.
In a regular season in which the Canucks have achieved near-perfect results, the Lindholm acquisition has gone the other way. The Swedish national, 29, has just five goals in 22 games, but the terrifying on-ice statistics when Lindholm is used are much more concerning.
Lindholm’s success in Calgary with a variety of linemates and in various deployment scenarios—not to mention his dominance in the faceoff circle—was perhaps what attracted Vancouver to him so much. However, early in the season with Calgary, we witnessed some deterioration in his play for the first time in his career, and this tendency has persisted in Vancouver.
At even strength, it is the most apparent. Examine the graph below, which compares Lindholm’s actual and predicted goal totals for each individual play.
Lindholm’s career high of 42 goals in the 2021–22 regular season is an anomaly; he was never an explosive goal scorer. However, even that year was moved.
in keeping with Lindholm’s capacity to consistently put defensive teams under duress and produce a high volume of scoring opportunities. Because it is moving in tandem with slower real scoring, the complete fall in Lindholm’s anticipated goal-scoring rate is noteworthy. That is the first issue.
The second, and possibly more significant, concern is that Lindholm’s lines have frequently outscored opponents at even strength. Because expected goals are suitably blind to the impact of shot percentages and goaltender performance, which can skew our perception of how well a particular player or line is performing, they can be a useful metric to monitor in this context.
For many seasons, Lindholm’s lines outperformed the opposition, consistently producing positive shooting and scoring opportunity differentials, which translated into positive real goal differentials most of the time. It appears that this season will be a ski slope, though, where actual goals are likewise in the red and predicted goals have fallen (to a career low):
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