Canucks Coffee: In brutal season, Linus Karlsson is a good news story

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There aren’t many off-the-radar good prospecting stories from the Jim Benning era, but there’s no doubt that Linus Karlsson is one.

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And his path to the Canucks was a quirky one. He was not on the radar of the Judd Brackett amateur staff. His skating was a big question mark.

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Even coming into this season, head coach Adam Foote admitted Friday he still had questions about Karlsson’s ability to get around. It had proven to be a serious question for observers the previous two seasons: he had four games in the 2023-24 season where you could see his board-battling abilities, but you could also see how slow his feet were in open ice. And even in his first couple games in the first half of the 2024-25 season he looked off the pace.

But as the season wore on last year, and especially in this season, he’s shown he’s an NHLer.

He’s always had the scoring ability. Whether he could translate his high-quality hands to the NHL was one question, but the skating was a whole other one, and really the only one.

He’s done it. And he’s done it in such a fashion Canucks management saw a play to keep him around for at least two more years.

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“He’s coachable,” Adam Foote said, above all else, after Friday’s game. And you know that’s essential. Being a player who understands where you need to go in improving your talents is one thing, but to be a player who can also do it is another.

Karlsson is that guy.

Early in the season, we had an exchange that was telling. He’d always been a scorer but here on the Canucks, his job was different. He was on the team to play smart minutes while the stars got a rest. If he could contribute, then great.

But he still needed to do more.

“We’re not winning and to stay here I need to score,” he said. Just being here, he implied, wasn’t enough. He wanted to stay. To not just survive, but thrive.

Now he has 10 goals and a new contract.

“I always believed in myself,” he said after Friday’s 4-3 shootout loss to the Seattle Kraken. “I knew I could play this good in this league. So, I mean, that’s probably the key — I always believed in myself and now I’ve got a lot of confidence and can show how good I can play. And just need to keep building. I think I have a lot more to show too…it’s going to be fun for two more years here.”

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Karlsson was a player first noted by the Canucks’ analytics department under former director of hockey operations Jonathan Wall and his then deputy Aiden Fox. The Sharks drafted Karlsson in 2018, but Wall and Fox added him to a list of players to watch for the Canucks’ pro scouting department and the team kept tabs on him. When it became clear that the Canucks needed to move on from Jonathan Dahlén, Karlsson became a target.

At the time, no one thought he looked like a prospect the Canucks should be interested in. Dahlén had been a star prize in the Alex Burrows trade, a player who the Ottawa Senators had been very, very excited about.

But in the end he proved to be more problem than talent and, in the end, Benning and his staff got this one right. Karlsson has always been able to score, has high character and managed to get better at every level.

“We have a lot of good coaches here,” he said, before name-checking two in particular. “The Sedins. Everyone.”

The Twins have far quieter roles here than they did in their prime, but it’s clear they’re still making an impact. Every day they showed up to work at a level beyond what people expected. They brought their teammates along with them. Clearly they’re connecting with the team’s younger players, too.

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“I try to take so much help as I can from them,” Karlsson said. “And just try to do it in games. And I think that’s the key. You want to be better. I’m not satisfied. I always get want to get better.”

Weird timing

Dumping the Karlsson news out at 4 p.m. on a Friday, right before the team is playing back to back games, then taking a day off, then travelling, was odd timing. This is a very good story for this team. But to release it hours after you had two high-profile players get named to the Olympics, with games on deck as well, was just odd timing.

Why not announce this on Thursday? Why not announce this two weeks from now when the team returns from its Eastern road trip?

Sure, here we are talking about it, but the run time here is short.

Minor time?

Might it make sense to send Tom Willander and Elias Pettersson, the defenceman, to Abbotsford at some point? Both have had good moments, but mostly they have struggled this year.

With this team going nowhere, why not send them to the AHL, give them a chance to play big minutes with a top-notch development coach in Manny Malhotra — a sort of finishing school before next season.

It’s been an awful first half of the season for Abbotsford, but they’re finally getting some talent back and adding two good defencemen surely would help juice a playoff chase. The organization needs a good story and such a pair of roster move would make a difference. Call up Jimmy Schuldt. He’s played in the NHL before.

pjohnston@postmedia.com

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