The 15 greatest Canucks of the decade

 

With everyone wrapped up in the end of the hell year that has been 2020, it’s easy to forget that this is also the end of a decade. Perhaps that’s because of the way people usually refer to decades: the 90’s are clearly from 1990 to 1999, right? Therefore, the 10’s are from 2010 to 2019.

Only, that’s not quite right. There’s no year zero in the modern calendar, so the decade goes from 1 to 10, or from 2011 to 2020 for our purposes. The National Research Council of Canada, keepers of Canada’s atomic clocks, pointing out at the turn of the millennium, “The 3rd Millennium and the 21st Century began at the same moment, namely zero hours on January 1st, 2001.”

The Farmer’s Almanac and the US Naval Observatory, keepers of time for the United States, agree that decades end on the tens, not on the nines.

With that resolved, let’s look back at the last decade and name the 15 best Canucks in that time. The last ten years have been full of delirious highs and crushing lows, featuring the best Canucks team of all time in 2011 and arguably their worst, when they set a new franchise low for fewest goals in a season in 2016-17.

For now, let’s celebrate the truly great players in the last decade. I’m going to use a mix of subjective opinion as well as a couple of all-in-one statistics: Point Shares from Hockey Reference and Wins Above Replacement (WAR) from Evolving Hockey.  

You can read more about Point Shares and WAR, if you’re looking for more information, but here are the basics. Point Shares attempts to calculate how many standings points each player contributes to their team, while WAR attempts to calculate how many wins a player is worth over a replacement-level player.

To the players!

15 | Jannik Hansen

The perennial unsung hero was one of the best players of the decade for the Canucks. Hansen went from a depth role to playing alongside the Sedin twins on the top line, scoring 22 goals in just 67 games in the 2015-16 season. More important than those offensive contributions, however, was his defensive work, playing a grinding role on third lines and logging a lot of minutes on the penalty kill.

Hansen won the Fred J. Hume award as the Canucks’ unsung hero three times this past decade, the only player to ever do so. It’s like people forgot how good he was in between wins, but this list doesn’t forget. 

Hansen was with the Canucks up until the 2017 trade deadline and his total of 7.7 WAR is fifth among Canucks skater over the past decade.