Patience Pays Off for Late Bloomer Guillaume Brisebois and the Canucks

Guillaume Brisebois is in his sixth pro season in the Vancouver Canucks organization. The 2015 draft pick has taken a rare path to score his first NHL goal.

No prospect in the 53-year history of the Vancouver Canucks has ever toiled as long as Guillaume Brisebois before scoring his first NHL goal.

Last Tuesday, the 25-year-old defenseman earned first-star honors in Vancouver's 5-2 win over the Dallas Stars thanks to his third-period one-timer off a sweet feed from Nils Aman.

Drafted by the Canucks in the third round in 2015, Brisebois' goal came in just his 22nd NHL game. Per Rob Williams of Daily Hive, no Canuck has ever waited longer to light the lamp for the first time for the team that drafted him.

The details in Williams' list confirm what may seem intuitive: for late bloomers, Brisebois' path is quite rare. Throughout the NHL, players who score their first career goals at 25 years old or later often come through the college route or from Europe. Not many are like Brisebois, in their sixth pro season with the same organization and with just a sniff of experience at the top level. More often, they've bounced around or weren't drafted.

Heck — Brisebois isn't even the oldest player on the Canucks to score his first NHL goal this season. That honor goes to Andrei Kuzmenko. Currently leading the Canucks with 34 goals, Kuzmenko is too old to even qualify for the Calder Trophy as NHL rookie of the year. He was already 26 years and eight months old when he played his first NHL game — and scored — on Oct. 12 against the Edmonton Oilers. 

Kuzmenko had played in Russia's top league for eight years before choosing to sign with Vancouver as a UFA last July. He's having a great debut season, but don't lose sight of the fact that he's older than everyone in Brisebois' draft class, including Connor McDavid. Born on Feb. 4, 1996, he's even three days older than 2014 first-overall pick Aaron Ekblad.

Brisebois was drafted out of major junior at age 18, in his first year of eligibility — and quite high, in the third round. Then, the native of Longueuil, Que. spent two more seasons in the QMJHL. He signed his entry-level contract with Vancouver quite early, in December 2015.

In 2017, at 20, Brisebois joined Vancouver's AHL farm team at the time, the Utica Comets. He made his NHL debut in his second pro season, appearing in eight games with the Canucks in 2018-19 but going pointless. 

In the 2019-20 season, he put up 15 points in 48 games with Utica as he played out the final year of his entry-level contract.

In October 2020, with the beginning of the NHL season delayed, Brisebois signed a one-year, two-way contract. Eligible to be claimed on waivers for the first time, he passed through without incident. 

In the topsy-turvy 2020-21 campaign, he appeared in one NHL game, did some time on the Canucks' taxi squad, and was loaned to the AHL's Laval Rocket for a month while cross-border travel was at a standstill.

Last year, as the Canucks moved their AHL affiliate closer to home in Abbotsford, Brisebois signed another one-year deal. He was injured during the NHL training camp, then sent to Abbotsford once he got healthy in mid-November. 

A month later, Brisebois was recalled by the Canucks. But he played just 4:13 in his first game back, a 5-2 win in San Jose, before being injured again and missing another 15 games. When he was declared fit in February, he returned to Abbotsford and finished out the year with seven points in 26 AHL games.

Brisebois turned 25 on July 21, 2022 — just days too late to qualify as a Group 6 UFA as a player with three pro seasons but less than 80 NHL games on his resumé. In late June, he signed another one-year, two-way deal. In October, he cleared waivers again.

But injuries on the Canucks led to his recall for three games in October, and he picked up his first career NHL assist in Vancouver's 5-1 win over Pittsburgh on Oct. 28, 2022. After Rick Tocchet took over as coach, Brisebois was recalled again in February after fellow lefty Oliver Ekman-Larsson suffered a sprained ankle and Riley Stillman was traded.

In 11 games since he re-joined the big club, the Canucks are 8-3-0. Pairing primarily on a pairing with veteran Tyler Myers, Brisebois has averaged 16:36 per game, including 2:02 per game on the penalty kill.

Thatcher Demko's return from injury in late February has certainly helped stabilize Vancouver's back end. But here's a look at the Canucks' key defensive stats since Brisebois' call-up:

In less than a month, the Canucks have gone from being at risk of having historically bad seasons in both goals against and penalty-killing. Their recent improvement has been so pronounced, they've likely already dug themselves out of that statistical sinkhole.

That reflects well on new coach Tocchet and his defensive advisors Adam Foote and Sergei Gonchar, on Demko and on the three journeyman defensemen who started the season in Abbotsford but have been holding down the fort in Vancouver: Brisebois, Christian Wolanin and Noah Juulsen. 

And that's the background behind Brisebois' two-year contract extension, which was announced on March 7, a week before he scored his goal.

Thanks to his steady play — and the leverage of being an impending UFA for the first time in his career — Brisebois has signed before the end of a season, giving himself some peace of mind. 

For the first time since his entry-level deal, it's a multi-year pact for two seasons. And while his NHL pay rate remains at the NHL minimum of $775,000, his AHL pay gets a boost from his previous deals: to $375,000 if he plays in Abbotsford next season and to a full one-way rate in 2024-25.

"I'm really happy about it, but I'm not satisfied with it," said Brisebois after his first-star turn against Dallas. "I think I have to build on that. 

"I think that's going to build a little bit of confidence but I've still got to play really hard and and prove myself every day."

To put Brisebois' journey into perspective, here are some other noteworthy players from his draft class: