The Anaheim Ducks are one of the teams the Vancouver Canucks need to reel in if they want any hope of making the playoffs. It shouldn’t have taken much to get the Canucks riled up to play a Pacific Division rival with whom you are ostensibly in a playoff race.
That’s what made the first period of the Canucks’ Saturday night game against the Ducks so utterly frustrating. It wasn’t just that they were bad — they were completely lifeless.
Calling the Canucks lackluster to start the game isn’t enough. They were completely devoid of luster, an inversion of luster that sucked all the light and energy out of an arena that was, for the first time in months, opened up to 100% capacity. The fans in attendance desperately wanted to cheer and the Canucks gave them nothing.
“We should be — I don’t want to use the word embarrassed — but, I mean, it just wasn’t good enough by us tonight,” said Canucks captain Bo Horvat, “Against a team in our division, you’re back to full capacity, and you want to play a heck of a game for your fans and we just — it was almost a letdown for us tonight and we can’t have those.”
A couple of other brief quotes from Horvat told the story: “no pushback” and “unacceptable.” The Ducks struck early and the Canucks had no response whatsoever. After the first period, the Ducks had three goals — the Canucks only had two shots.
“It’s something we can’t let happen,” said Horvat. “It’s on all of us. It’s on me. It’s on me playing better, it’s on everybody in that room taking accountability and getting the job done.”
“We all knew the importance of this game,” said Canucks head coach Bruce Boudreau. “To not come out with that sense of urgency is bothersome.”
Perhaps this was predictable. The Canucks have not been very good recently, even if they had won three of their last four games.
“I do this sort of graph and show them trends and tried to explain to them that we won the last two games but we didn’t play great, so we’re trending in the wrong direction,” said Boudreau. “The Islanders game we allowed five goals in the first period — not a good sign. The habits that they might’ve had earlier are creeping in.”
That’s an interesting comment from Boudreau, suggesting that the Canucks from earlier in the season are rearing their ugly heads. It seems like the Canucks are on the verge of once again becoming the “fragile team” that former general manager Jim Benning called them back in November.
“We get too down on ourselves, a little bit, when things don’t go our way,” said Horvat. “I think it takes us a bit to stop feeling sorry for ourselves and get back at it and play the right way. By that time, it’s too late, we’re down 5-0.”
“It’s a ‘woe is me’ mentality,” said Boudreau. “It’s not a tough, ‘let’s get out of this thing’ mentality. And if you have a ‘woe is me’ mentality — ‘Uh oh, here we go again,’ like Eeyore on Winnie the Pooh, for crying out loud — then we’re not going to go anywhere. That mentality has to change and, if it hasn’t changed today, it better change tomorrow.”
As someone who deeply relates to Eeyore, I feel that one in my gut. Who knows what tomorrow may bring but today I watched this game.
- The Canucks had to play pretty much the entire game with just five defencemen after Kyle Burroughs left the game in the opening minute. He took a heavy hit on the end boards and appeared to injure his shoulder. “It doesn’t look very good for the short term,” was the only update from Boudreau.
- Shortly after Burroughs left the ice, the Ducks added insult to injury, opening the scoring on a Troy Terry tip. Ekman-Larsson pinched hard in the neutral zone, then took too long to identify Terry as his man, so Terry had no pressure as he deflected the puck over Thatcher Demko’s shoulder and under the bar.
- A couple of minutes later, the Ducks made it 2-0 when the Canucks never found their defensive structure after Travis Hamonic broke up a Ducks’ rush. Hamonic went chasing to the point, throwing everyone else into confusion. Quinn Hughes and Elias Pettersson couldn’t decide who would go to Derek Grant with the puck, so neither did, and Nicolas Deslauriers snuck behind them to tip in Grant’s pass, with Conor Garland a step too slow to cover him.
- I had to laugh at Nils Höglander trying to take credit for a Luke Schenn penalty. “Not you! Schenn!” said the referee on a hot mic, but Höglander still sat in the box until Schenn came over to kick him out. Maybe he was trying to keep Schenn available to kill the penalty, especially with the Canucks only having five defenceman, but I like to think Höglander was just trying to goose his penalty minutes.
- The Ducks made it 3-0 on the power play when Rickard Rakell tipped a Jamie Drysdale point shot under Demko, who had stretched his body upwards like Mr. Fantastic to stop the original shot, which was going over the net, so that seems counterproductive.
- The second period started off just as bad as the first, as the Canucks’ penalty kill evaporated. Demko stopped the initial shot by Jakob Silfverberg, but Ekman-Larsson was outnumbered 3-to-1 on the rebound. Both Tyler Motte and J.T. Miller watched from above the hashmarks as Adam Henrique put the puck in to make it 4-0.
- “We can’t kill a penalty. Special teams is killing us — it’s been killing this team the whole year,” said Boudreau. That seems to be the only thing the penalty kill is killing.
- Technically — very technically — the 5-0 goal wasn’t on the power play, so the penalty kill did manage to kill off a Quinn Hughes hooking minor. Again, only technically. Sam Steel, which has to be the name of a love interest in a romance novel somewhere, swatted in a puck in a wild scramble two seconds after the penalty expired.
- That was the end of Demko’s night, as Jaroslav Halak came in to replace him. It was a rough night Demko, making just 9 saves on 14 shots. You have to hope Vezina voters were watching his 51-save performance against the Leafs last Saturday and not this one. Good thing this game was at the usual 7pm start time, so most of the voters on the East Coast were already in bed.
- “He had zero chance on pretty much all of those goals and that’s on us,” said Horvat. “Thatcher’s been unbelievable for us all year, so I have no worries about him.”
- At least Elias Pettersson had a good game. Even in the dreadful first period, Pettersson had the Canucks’ only real chance in the first period, ringing a shot off John Gibson’s mask. Pettersson seemed like one of the few Canucks playing with any sort of real urgency and he made some excellent plays to create chances.
- “I thought he played hard — really hard — tonight,” said Boudreau of Pettersson. “When he’s leading the team in hits, there’s a definite problem.”
- To be fair, Luke Schenn led the team with 8 hits and Pettersson had 4. But his point still stands.
- Pettersson made an aggressive play to help create the Canucks’ first goal, forechecking hard on Grant to steal the puck in the Ducks’ zone and put it on the stick of Conor Garland. Tanner Pearson was all alone at the backdoor, as Cam Fowler was too busy blowing the zone to notice the turnover. Garland fed Pearson, who fed the back of the net.
- If there’s one thing on which hockey fans can all agree, it’s funny when a guy gets hit into the benches. It’s even funnier when it’s an official. Look, even linesman Bevan Mills agrees. Look at that smile. He knows that’s comedy gold.
- It appeared that the Ducks’ penalty kill forgot about Pettersson, which shouldn’t be surprising when the people of Anaheim, next door to Compton, were so quick to forget about Dre. They left him wide open in the Petterzone — the top of the right faceoff circle — and Hughes put the puck right in his wheelhouse. So anyway, Pettersson started blasting, sending the puck whizzing past Gibson’s ear to make it 5-2.
- Any hopes of a comeback were quickly dashed. Just one minute after Pettersson’s goal, a veritable comedy of errors gave the Ducks their sixth goal. First, Hughes sent a pass through his own crease that nearly deflected in off Halak’s skate, then Schenn coughed up the puck with a weak clearing attempt, then Simon Benoit’s point shot hit the post, went off Halak’s back, and rolled towards the net. Halak might’ve been able to reach it, but Schenn dove behind him to try to clear the puck, blocking him, and Henrique shoved it in.
- The game was basically over after two periods but the pain continued. The Ducks made it 7-2 on a broken play in transition. Pettersson, at the end of his shift, couldn’t get back to prevent the late trailer, Deslauriers from scoring his second goal of the night.
- The Canucks at least gave the fans that stuck around for the third period something to cheer about, scoring two more goals. Garland’s goal was a beauty — a wickedly unexpected backhand from a terrible angle that Gibson didn’t see coming. Gibson was crouched down low, with his stick flat on the ice to block the centring pass that a normal person would have attempted, so he couldn’t do anything about a weirdo like Garland banking the puck in off his back.
- Then Quinn Hughes gave the Canucks a fourth goal with a slap shot through traffic. It was a mess in front of Gibson, with Matthew Highmore and Juho Lammikko literally falling all over themselves to block Gibson’s view of the puck.
- Things got a little heated in the third period, with Vasily Podkolzin causing a ruckus with Maxime Comtois after a big hit by Benoit on Nils Höglander. The altercation showed us at least one thing: Podkolzin has, at the very least, learned some cuss words in English, as he had several unkind things to say to Comtois on his way to the penalty box, with the Sportsnet feed quickly cutting away to a surprisingly-not-swearing Boudreau.
- Oliver Ekman-Larsson left the game in the third period with an apparent leg injury after getting squished against the boards by a Sam Carrick hipcheck. Boudreau had no update on Ekman-Larsson, but if both he and Burroughs miss games, that’s two of the three defencemen playing on the left side out of the lineup. This might have been a costly game in multiple ways.
