The Canucks Paul Cotter Is Making Himself Hard to Ignore

Yesterday, I wrote a short piece highlighting Paul Cotter and the opportunity in front of him in Vancouver. Well, Cotter didn't waste much time answering the question. Two goals, including the overtime winner, in his Canucks debut against Edmonton are about as good an opening chapter as a player can write. But the overtime goal really caught my attention because it told us something about Cotter beyond the box score.

He wanted the puck. He won the battle along the wall, and Edmonton defenceman Ryan Shea seemed to think Cotter would stay down after the contact. Cotter didn't. He got back up, went directly to the net and finished the play. That's determination.

These kinds of plays immediately make Cotter valuable for this Canucks team.

And maybe that's what makes Cotter such an interesting story for Vancouver right now. This isn't a player being handed a comfortable role and asked to fill it. He's being given a big opportunity to show that he can be more than he's been before.

Manny Malhotra put Cotter and Max Sasson on the ice in overtime. That's an interesting choice, and Cotter rewarded the coach's confidence. Another interesting wrinkle came during the intermission, when Elliotte Friedman suggested that if Vancouver were selling at the trade deadline, Cotter could attract a first-round pick from a contender.

That's a long way down the road, obviously. But it creates an intriguing subplot. Because Cotter sounds like he wants to stay in Vancouver. And if he keeps playing like this, the Canucks may have to decide whether they've found something they want to keep rather than something they might eventually want to sell.

These early-season games can be really interesting for laying out the possibilities.

That's the fun part of these early-season games. Nobody knows exactly what a player is going to become yet. Cotter is getting his chance to find out. For Vancouver, that's a pretty good problem to have.

The Canucks need players who compete, who can play in difficult situations and who aren't afraid to go to the hard areas of the ice. Cotter just gave them a pretty good example. One game doesn't make a career. But sometimes a player tells you something about himself in one play.

Cotter's overtime winner did exactly that.