Whether you’re Team Tank or Team Technically We Can Still Make the Playoffs, when it comes to the Boston Bruins, I think we’re all on the same page: win or lose, just don’t let Brad Marchand score a hattrick.
Aw crap.
I watched this game.
- That got ugly. For the third time in his last five starts, Ryan Miller faced 40+ shots. It was the eighth time this season. Is it any wonder he’s likely on his way out of Vancouver as soon as the season ends?
- Alex Edler definitely didn’t have his best game, but he wasn’t at fault on the Bruins opening goal: he thoroughly tied up David Backes’s stick, but Patrice Bergeron’s centring pass banked off Backes’s skate. Sidenote: David Backes should definitely get the letter “S” tattooed on his back several times so that we can refer to Backes’s back esses.
- The Sedins have looked resurgent over the last few games and have started to string together shifts that may not be full of Sedinery, but are at least Sedinesque. They’re in the right neighbourhood, they’re just not quite following all the bylaws and rules of their strata.
- After Backes opened the scoring, the Sedins hit Reply All and showed everyone that they still have some gas left in the tank. They broke out of the defensive zone on a 3-on-2 with Markus Granlund as the trailer. Henrik drove the net, taking Torey Krug with him, Daniel passed to Granlund, and Granlund bulged the mesh like a teenaged boy in a hot tub full of bikini models.
- Just over a minute later, the Sedins set up Granlund again off a 3-on-2 rush. This time, Granlund drove through the middle, opening up space behind him for Henrik to hit Daniel with a cross-ice pass. Daniel found Granlund with a deft one-touch pass and Granlund swept it home like the last rock of the bonspiel.
- You know what this means, of course: the Sedins and Granlund are rush scorers. Better get them off the power play.
- It was a pretty great first period, capped off by Nikita Tryamkin getting into a mild shoving match with Brad Marchand. That was mostly innocent, but the best part was when David Backes came flying in to defend his teammate and Tryamkin just bear-hugged his head, rendering him completely ineffective. “Let go of his f***ing head,” the ref instructed Tryamkin, clear as day to the Sportsnet microphones. Eventually, Tryamkin did.
- Granlund’s best chance for a hattrick came on a second period power play drawn by Henrik. Bo Horvat set him up perfectly in the slot, but Granlund made like Ted Striker and his shot missed up high.
- It was great to see Reid Boucher start the game with Bo Horvat and Sven Baertschi, aka. The BoBaeBouch Line. Boucher’s heavy shot has been a nice addition to that line and I was looking forward to seeing if they could continue to develop some chemistry. So, of course, the trio lasted all of two shifts together and Boucher was replaced by Jayson Megna, who is basically a bargain bin version of Mason Raymond, if Mason Raymond was as bad as Canucks fans seemed to think he was.
- I’m under no illusions here: it’s not like Boucher is a future franchise forward or anything. But he is four years younger than Megna and has a significantly higher ceiling. Just give him a shot like he’s giving you shots: a team-high five of them against the Bruins, despite getting just 11:16 in ice time, ahead of only Joseph LaBate’s 5:30.
- Also, play LaBate more. Why not? The Canucks are now 12 points out of a playoff spot: play the young guys and see what they can do.
- To Megna’s credit, he had some good shifts with Horvat and Baertschi, getting a couple good scoring chances and setting up Baertschi for his best chance of the game. But he was also at fault for the Bruins’ second goal, stopping to fetch his lost stick in the corner while his check, Jimmy Hayes, went to the front of the net and tipped Zdeno Chara’s point shot past Miller. That error seemed to earn him a one-shift-long benching, as Michael Chaput was on the Horvat line on their next shift.
- Drew Shore played his first game as a Canuck, donning Kyle Wellwood’s old #42. He had a pretty good game when you consider he was playing 20 shifts on next to no sleep after flying in from Switzerland on Sunday. He assisted on Alex Edler’s 3-2 goal, finding the defenceman with a nice cross-ice pass as he jumped up in the rush. Edler’s first shot was blocked, but he followed up and tucked his second shot under Rask’s arm it was a thermometer and Rask had a fever.
- But then Shore took a dumb penalty at the end of the second period and a dogged Bruins’ power play tied the game 3-3 early in the third period. The entire Canucks penalty kill stood staring at Patrice Bergeron, completely ignoring Marchand wide open at the backdoor. Miller weirdly tried to block the pass in his butterfly, but that just left the net as wide open as Marchand.
- It was all downhill from there. Marchand scored his second goal when he picked Henrik’s pocket in the defensive zone, danced around Edler in front, then went inside the far-right post like he had clicked on a Breitbart article.
- David Krejci made it 5-3 when Luca Sbisa lost the puck below the goal line and Alex Edler aggressively moved to check David Pastrnak, only to leave Krjeci open for the easy tap-in. Then Brad Marchand added an empty netter for the hattrick just to rub some extra salt in the wound. It's almost more salt than wound at this point.
