If you think this is a rough start to a season for the Vancouver Canucks, you should have seen last year, or the year before, or the year before that.

Heck, with a 2-2-2 record, they have six points in six games. With that, Alain Vigneault tied his record for the most points he’s ever had to start a season in Vancouver. Congratulations.

You have to go all the way back to 2008 for the last time Canucks hit such a lofty perch to start a season. Then, the Canucks were 3-3.

Yes, the Canucks are slow starters. Notoriously slow starters. So, critique their middling kickoff to the 2013 shortened season at your peril. They could make you look foolish in three weeks. Or two.

They will get their chance at finding some traction this season with a friendly opponent in the Colorado Avalanche, a team the Canucks have dominated, going 15-0-2 in their past 17 games.

But nothing right now is a gimme.

Routine or not, there are some troubling signs after the first six games. Some were predictable. Like Jason Garrison. Who can be surprised a player from Florida coming off a fairly significant injury is having a difficult time transitioning into the Vancouver Canucks lineup?

The Canucks just have to hope Garrison is more David Booth, who took a month to get comfortable, than Keith Ballard, who needed a year. To help Garrison along, how about a couple of set plays on the power play to free him up for that shot which helped him score 16 goals last year?

But it’s not just the guy from Florida who has underwhelmed. Dan Hamhuis, the bedrock of the Canucks blueline because of his consistency, has already been on the ice for nine goals against. And when he’s been paired with Kevin Bieksa, the duo has uncharacteristically struggled, even been dominated for stretches. Go by past performance, they still have the potential to be one of the Western Conference’s best shutdown pairings. We haven’t seen that this year.

Alex Edler is coming off a two-game stretch where he gave away one goal to Joe Pavelski in San Jose, then helped Slava Voynov score another by screening Roberto Luongo in L.A.

Manny Malhotra has been a healthy scratch in favour of a hobbled Max Lapierre, who is being asked to play through a groin injury. Chris Higgins is missing a gear, or three. He was better in L.A. but his usual explosiveness has been absent.

The Sedins have been unable to initiate much of a cycle. Their puck possession game which has worn down opponents over the years has been obvious in only handful of shifts in the first six games. Some assumed the Sedins would have an advantage this year, without a training camp. If anyone could play together without preparation, it’s the twins. But it hasn’t quite worked out that way. At least, they’ve had Zack Kassian to count on for a few goals.

Interestingly, all of the struggling players share something in common. They weren’t playing in Europe. They weren’t playing in the AHL. They were members of Camp Canuck, the nickname given to the group of players who stayed in Vancouver during the lockout, practising a few times a week at UBC.

Sometimes they skated with the UBC Thunderbirds. But mostly, the group of eight to ten players were playing shinny on their own. There weren’t many weeks where they were able to manufacture intensity, something which the UBC coaches picked up on.

It’s impossible to compare lockout scrimmages around NHL cities. But Keith Ballard’s experience sounded much different. He described on-ice workouts in Minnesota with 30 players who skated for 45 minutes before then having 45-minute scrimmages four times a week. Nothing like that was going on in Vancouver.

And, actually, this is all encouraging for the Canucks. At least, it gives the team something more to hope for than Ryan Kesler donning a cape.

No one can be sure what kind of impact Kesler is going to have. Even if he starts skating with the team this week, he’s coming off two major off season surgeries which have limited him from working on his shot and his upper body strength.

But Vancouver can expect its Camp Canuck players to find their game speed. It will happen at some point. The Sedins didn’t age eight years in four months.

Throughout the lockout, Bieksa and the Sedins predicted it would take them one to two weeks to catch up to players who had been playing in Europe. Well, one week is now in the books.

Time to start ramping up.

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