Buying or Selling the NHL’s Early Breakouts

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It’s fun seeing fans’ reactions to what Filip Hronek is doing this season in Vancouver. After all, it was a bit odd when Detroit dealt him to the Canucks last year. He was a solid point producer for the Red Wings, and they’re an up-and-coming team with hopes of returning to the playoffs…kind of like the Vancouver Canucks.

Hronek went from pairing up with Ben Chiarot and Olli Määttä in Detroit and scoring between 30 and 40 points a season to playing with Quinn Hughes in Vancouver and scoring nearly a point per game (20 points in 21 games). Hronek’s career high is 39 points, and if the Canucks score at a torrid pace like this all season, he’d shatter that mark before the All-Star Game.

Did Hronek have this kind of skill and ability in Detroit? The Wings weren’t a great team while he was there, and the choices of who to play him with were slim. He wasn’t paired with Moritz Seider very often, or ever (54:40 together at five-on-five in nearly two seasons, via Natural Stat Trick). Seider produced well immediately as a rookie, but so did Hronek in a secondary role as a puck-mover behind him.

In Vancouver, coach Rick Tocchet put his two most offensively gifted blue liners together, and now they’re helping drive an offense that has everyone’s heads spinning between Hughes and Hronek’s play on the blue line, and Elias Pettersson, J.T. Miller and Brock Boeser up front.

Are they putting all their eggs in one basket on defense? Maybe, but who cares? It’s working and working well and Hronek playing with Hughes has opened things up in a big way.

Hronek’s advanced numbers aren’t terribly different in Vancouver than they were in Detroit—they’re a little better because the Canucks are better than those Wings teams. Hronek’s five-on-five PDO is rather high (1.067) and may regress, but not to the point where it would crater everything else he’s doing.

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