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Foote gives glowing praise to one young Vancouver Canucks defenceman

Trevor Beggs
Trevor Beggs
|
Mar 5 2026, 2:00 pm
Foote gives glowing praise to one young Vancouver Canucks defenceman
Christopher Morris/Imagn Images

Here’s something to make you feel old.

The Vancouver Canucks currently have four defencemen in their lineup who were born in 2002 or later.

Unsurprisingly, that’s most in the NHL.

Being an NHL coach is hard. But being thrust into a situation where the four of your defencemen have less NHL experience than former Canucks castoff Jalen Chatfield certainly adds to the challenge.

Despite the trying circumstances, some of the Canucks young defencemen are making strides.

Elias Pettersson is looking like the most physically imposing player on the Canucks right now, a role that sorely needs to be filled since the departure of Kiefer Sherwood.

Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin told the media earlier in the day that he wanted to see more fight from his players.

Well, D-Petey may be showing more fight than most on this roster.

Aside from mixing it up, he also laid a thunderous hit on Chatfield late in the third period.

Not only did Pettersson bring the toughness, but he even led the Canucks with four shots on goal against the Hurricanes.

“I just loved Junior,” Foote said after the 6-4 loss to Carolina. “He was tough. There’s a couple times he got turned around, but he’s tough and not afraid.”

However, that wasn’t the defenceman who caught Foote’s eye most when asked about the challenge of coaching all of these young defencemen.

“I just was really happy with Willander,” he said. “[He’s] relentless and he’s not scared.”

“It’s amazing to me, a guy’s all over him and he’s just fine with it. At that age, it’s pretty impressive.”

All of a sudden, Willander has been thrust into a top-four role for the Canucks with the departure of Tyler Myers.

He played a career-high 22:33 during the Canucks loss to the Dallas Stars earlier this week. And on Wednesday against Carolina, he was third among Canucks defenders, skating 18:51.

The rookie certainly hasn’t been perfect, but he’s handled himself well considering where the Canucks are in the standings. The 21-year-old also played just five AHL games before becoming a full-time NHLer back in October.

“Yeah, he’s going to make some decisions, like maybe that he should have harder clears at times, things like that, but that’ll come with reps,” Foote said.

“But, to see him play in traffic and not be bothered, that’s a good sign.”

The next step in Willander’s development would be to get more time on the penalty kill. That’s been something Foote and the coaching staff have been reluctant to do for most of the season.

But now, they have no choice.

Willander got 1:16 of penalty kill time against the Hurricanes. It was just the third time in his career that he got more than a minute of PK time in a game.

And wouldn’t you know, the Canucks didn’t surrender a shot attempt against when he was on the ice.

For Canucks fans looking for slivers of positivity amongst this horrid season, they can take solace in the fact that Willander is showing flashes of the future top-four defenceman he was drafted to be.

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