Welcome Matt: Canucks lines due for a shake up and Höglander deserves a promotion

The Vancouver Canucks have lost three of four and it’s time to shuffle the forward lines.

As we talked about prior to the season, line stability often equates to team stability and through a 13-6-1 start, their forward trios have stayed pretty much intact. The changes have been born of injury, most recently to Pius Suter.

But Canucks head coach Rick Tocchet moved Anthony Beauvillier to the second line with J.T. Miller and Brock Boeser Wednesday in a 5-2 loss to the Avalanche. Phil Di Giuseppe — the darling of the first 10 games — found himself demoted after just two points in his last seven games.

It may well be that the 30-year-old journeyman has run his course as a top-six forward. He hasn’t been that in the past, and even with late-bloomer rationale, it’s probably too much to ask him to masquerade as such over 82 regular season games.

Conversely, Beauvillier may have some upward mobility given his recent play, not that it’s translated into production.

No, that would be Nils Höglander, who scored in Colorado and has points in four straight games.

We wondered a couple of weeks back if he was done being a healthy scratch. That proved premature, but the feisty Swede has applied the benching lessons and has played better since.

It’s time Höglander gets some opportunity with better players. Why not try him with Elias Pettersson and Andrei Kuzmenko, to see if he can get them going?

And move Ilya Mikheyev to Miller’s line, not because he deserves a demotion, more because you need a better alternative to Di Giuseppe. That still gives Miller and Boeser a speedy winger who can get in on the forecheck, and it takes the pressure off PDG to produce, and assigns him a more appropriate role in the bottom-six.

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