I don't mind Gaunce, his skating is looking a little better and he checks hard but I have to agree with what Ray Ferraro said.
He said it is hard to ice players who never score in today's NHL. The best thing that can happen on a shift is nothing. On a bad shift this player gets scored on. On a good shift he doesn't get scored on. But there is no upside that impacts a game. The upside is not getting score on.
Isn't that a bit of an oversimplification, though? The best thing that can happen on a shift is that your team scores. It doesn't have to be the individual player pulling the trigger (though of course that helps.) The worst thing that can happen is that the other team scores.
Also, the question isn't whether to play Gaunce or Horvat, or Gaunce or one of the twins. The players he has to beat are those at the bottom of the lineup. They are those that are least effective in having their own team score compared with the other team.
This season the Canucks have scored a higher % of the goals at 5 on 5 with Gaunce on the ice (42.86%) than they do with Granlund (38.1%,) Gagner (29.17%) or Vanek (38.1%.) Of course he's also ahead of Dowd's one game (0%.) It isn't very good, but even though each of those three players score more than Gaunce, the team has done worse with them on the ice than with Gaunce on the ice. (Yes, I realize that GF% is a stat that inherently suffers from small sample size as well as differences in usage.)
Imo Gaunce deserves to play-at the bottom of this lineup. He doesn't score himself, but we don't see clips of him ignoring his man on the way to his own net to cause goals against. He doesn't need to outscore the opposition personally. He just needs to be less bad than the worst of the other forwards at the combination of avoiding goals against and having his team score. He's ok at the first and poor at the second.
Stats were from corsica.hockey. I would have looked at QOC and zone starts but the site started giving me consistent (hopefully temporary) error messages when I tried.