If you were to go by the first 12 games of the season, Henrik Sedin may never score again.

You’d probably conclude more than 20 left wingers will end up with more goals than Daniel Sedin this year, including Mason Raymond.

Your Sedin chart would be downward trending, looking something like a wizard’s wand directing you toward an underground hovel. The wand would be suggesting “Here’s where their production is going. You know, where Mike Richards lives.”

You’d talk a lot about regression and the number 32, the Sedins’ age. It would probably your best guess as to why the twins are off to their slowest start since the lockout, more than seven years ago.

But it’s just 12 games, which may qualify as a quarter of a season this year, but it is still just 12 games.

If you’re troubled by it, consider Henrik has the same number of points as Claude Giroux, is fourth among Western Conference centres in assists and is two years younger than Pavel Datsyuk.

Daniel has the same number of goals as both Rick Nash and Evander Kane, and is a year younger than Patrick Marleau.

The biggest problem in the perception, however, is not because of the doughnut sitting beside Henrik’s name in the goals-for column, though that could fester. It’s comparing the Sedins to their best years, which were two mesmerizing seasons of unusual dominance from 2009-11.

You can’t keep expecting the 2010-11 twins to show up. It’s like waiting for the 114-point Joe Thornton to return; or the 91-point Brad Richards; or the 65-goal Alex Ovechkin.

The moment passes. The moment ends.

It doesn’t mean Ovechkin can’t score 30 a year for the next six years. It doesn’t mean the Sedins won’t be point-a-game players, models of consistency for the next five years, which would still make them underpaid at $6.1 million a season.

It just means all the circumstances which came together for the Sedins to lead the league in scoring are unlikely to ever harmonize quite like that again.

It’s not unlike music. In four years from 1968-1972, the Rolling Stones created four of the best albums ever. What followed was a career most musicians would join the illuminati and partake in satanic rituals to get. But, for the Stones, it was never like Exile on Main St. again.

This year, the Sedins are still trying to get their sea legs after a bizarre offseason where they had too much time for tennis and shinny because of a four-month lockout.

Their game is not the most conducive to a shortened season without a training camp, which followed an offseason that knocked them off their routine.

They are not players who are going to overpower opponents with brute force. They are not going to out-skate opponents with blinding speed. They work on the ice like a clock without a face. It’s methodical, and precise. And that clock is off right now. It needs time.

But it’d be foolish to suggest timing is all the Sedins need. They could use some tweaks, because they just aren’t getting the shots on net they once did.

At their best, they averaged more than 5.3 shots a game. Now, it’s less than four. And that probably hangs on goalless Henrik, who has 16 shots in 12 games and 70 shots on net in his past 55. That’s not going to lead to too many goals over the course of a 48-game schedule.

It also makes them far too predictable.

If anything, the twins’ sluggish start is more reality check than crisis. The Canucks needed them to be 100-point players to get to the Stanley Cup final in 2011. They are going to have to find other ways to score now.

Ryan Kesler coming back will help. So would a healthy David Booth. But that only gets the Canucks to where they were last year. They had Kesler, Booth, and the Sedins and it still wasn’t enough.

The team needs more, and has an obvious hole. They have a need for a third-line centre who can push play.

They also have two excellent goalies and only one net for them to play in. Will there be a fit before the April 3 trade deadline?

The Canucks better hope so.

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