Are the Vancouver Canucks…good?
The first game back from a long road trip can sometimes be a trap. Teams are still tired from all the travel and have to deal with the time zone change if their trip took them to the east coast. On top of that, a team can let their guard down once they’re back home and sleeping in their own beds, leading to a sleepy start to the game.
Not the Canucks on Friday night. They dominated the first period, piling up ten shots on goal before the visiting St. Louis Blues could manage one, eventually out-shooting the Blues 19-to-3.
“That’s about as well as you can play in a sense of playing fast and pucks to the net and shots and opportunities,” said J.T. Miller about the first period. “You’re not gonna get periods like that all the time.”
The only concern was that the Canucks didn’t fully take advantage of the tilted ice, only scoring one goal in the first, but that wasn’t too much of a concern to head coach Rick Tocchet.
“The first period was one of our best first periods,” said Tocchet. “Coming off of that long road trip, I thought it set the tone. Even though it was one-nothing and St. Louis was hanging around, I thought we really dominated play.”
That dominance, to a lesser degree, continued all game, as the Canucks cruised to a 5-0 win while out-shooting the Blues 35-to-22.
It wasn’t just that the Canucks won so handily or out-shot the Blues so thoroughly; it was how they did it. The Canucks looked fast — not something that has been said about the Canucks for years — and they were relentless with their up-ice pressure.
Tocchet has repeatedly talked about defending while skating forward and the Canucks executed that to perfection, particularly in the first period.
“When you gap up and skate forward to defend, it’s suffocating,” said Tocchet. “Plus, I felt our quick ups when our D got the puck — we didn’t take it back. Sometimes, we have a habit of taking it back and I felt we punched it back up.
“When you skate forward…you play faster. I think it’s probably the best we’ve played that style — skating forward defending and quick ups — this year.”
And, when they were playing that style, the Canucks looked like a good team. A really good team. Like, an “uh-oh, this team is giving me hope” kind of good.
Like Jordan Binnington watched a lot of pucks fly his way, I watched this game.
- Heading into the game, the Canucks had the fewest power play opportunities in the NHL, so their four first-period power plays — the first coming just 17 seconds into the game — felt like an appropriate course correction. Honestly, it felt like the power play just never ended; it basically looked like a 20-minute power play.
- This breakout is a perfect example of the Canucks looking so much faster: Quinn Hughes skated behind his own net after a defensive zone faceoff win and Nils Höglander was in a perfect position to take his pass and hit a streaking Sam Lafferty for a partial breakaway chance that hit the post after he out-waited Jordan Binnington. It’s not just that Hughes and Lafferty are quick skaters but that Höglander hustled to the right pace and right time to execute the breakout quickly too.
- Hughes opened the scoring after the Canucks hemmed the Blues into the defensive zone. Filip Hronek attacked from the right point and faked a shot, drawing the Blues to his side of the ice, then flung the puck to Hughes, giving him huge tracts of land with the puck. He took full advantage by avoiding bursting into song and instead sending a perfect post-and-in shot past Binnington.
- The key to the possession that led to Hughes’ goal was a great puck retrieval off a Hronek shot nearly a minute earlier. The Blues corraled the rebound, but then Elias Pettersson and Ilya Mikheyev quickly attacked the puck, forcing a turnover to Hughes on the boards to extend the possession and change the forward line with the puck in the offensive zone.
- “Huge, huge,” said Tocchet about that play. “Puck retrieval is anticipation and people being in the right spots…When guys take shots and guys are standing around, they’re on their heels, you don’t pick up on those loose pucks and that’s when you’re one-and-done. And we talked about that — I thought early in the trip, we were one-and-done out there.”
- Nils Höglander had a very strong game despite having the lowest ice time on the team at 11:09. Shots on goal were 9-to-2 when he was on the ice at 5-on-5 and he was flying around the ice making nifty plays to win or keep puck possession. He was a delight.
- “We had a lot of power plays — we had four in the first period — so [Höglander] didn't get out there that much,” said Tocchet. “What I like about him, he sat on the bench for a period of time and to come out there and give us energy, that's where I'm impressed. That's hard. You know, you sit on the bench, your legs are tight, and for him to do that, I was impressed the way he played the last two periods.”
- “I think our forwards, especially our bottom six, they are working so hard,” said Hughes. “They have an identity right now, I mean, Höglander, Suter, and Dak, and Garland — all those guys are making those D work. And you know, that's what tires out teams…[Höglander’s] 22-years-old now, he's finding his identity. He knows what he's good at and he's sticking to it.”
- The Canucks didn’t dominate the second period as much territorially, but they did dominate terri-score-ially. No, that doesn’t work. That’s terrible. Moving on.
- Hughes got a lucky bounce to extend the lead to 2-0, but he worked for his luck. He stepped around Jake Neighbours at the point, swooped around the right flank, then sent a backhand pass towards Phil Di Giuseppe at the backdoor. The puck never made it, instead deflecting in off the skate of Kevin “Purple” Hayes.
- Di Giuseppe finally got the puck a minute later, this time from Tyler Myers. He and Carson Soucy combined to steal the puck from Brandon Saad, who was lone-wolfing it up the ice. Meanwhile, Di Giuseppe was surreptitiously sneaking behind Nick Leddy and Myers put a pass right on his tape for a breakaway. Di Giuseppe made like a perfect wine pairing and matched the lovely dish with a smooth finish, tucking the puck five-hole on Binnington to make it 3-0.
- After the Canucks got the first four power play, the Blues finally got one in the second period but it backfired. Elias Pettersson picked off a pass in the neutral zone and sent J.T. Miller in alone. Miller made like Lucius Best and froze Binnington in his tracks with a fake shot, allowing Miller to pull the puck to his backhand for a wide-open net.
- “The PK goal, that’s Petey,” said Tocchet. “He picked it off and then that sauce — that’s a tough pass too, he had to saucer that puck. That’s a highly, highly skilled play and then obviously, Millsy put it in, that’s a great goal.”
- Tocchet had to admit he was still worried before Miller scored the shorthanded goal: “I was still nervous for the game. It was 3-0 at that time, so it helped us solidify what we wanted to do.”
- Pettersson made another great play in the neutral zone for the 5-0 goal in the third period, racing to catch Jordan Kyrou to lift his stick and steal the puck. He swept the puck to Andrei Kuzmenko, who made a nifty hook pass back to Pettersson, who relayed the puck to Ilya Mikheyev, who relayed the puck through Binnington’s five-hole.
- “He’s a very methodical player,” said Toccher of Pettersson. “He’s cerebral in a sense — it’s like chess, he’s two steps ahead. He knows that it’s gonna go D-to-D and it’s probably going to hit the weak side, so I’m gonna probably go here. He plays possum a lot — he’ll fake like he’s going to go somewhere and then he stops and he’ll pick off passes. He’s really good at that.”
- “I take big responsibility with that — good defence leads to good offence,” said Pettersson about the two neutral zone plays. “If you don’t work hard on defence, you’ll never get the puck on offence, so that’s my mentality. I’m just trying to be the best player I can be at both ends.”
- Mark Friedman looked quite solid on a pair with Ian Cole, as the two dominated puck possession against the Blues. Shot attempts were 24-to-3 when Friedman was on the ice at 5-on-5 and shots on goal were 15-to-3, which is the biggest ratio since Andrew Tate tried to take on Greta Thunberg. Defensive plays like breaking up this Saad breakaway certainly helped.
- When the Blues finally were able to get some chances, particularly a couple of breakaways and transition chances in the third period, Thatcher Demko came up with some huge saves, fully earning his shutout even if he only had to make 22 saves.
- “He was awesome,” said Miller. “He was probably pretty bored the first half of the game but he made some unreal saves in the second half… In the second half of the game, he made us look pretty good, in my opinion. We had some breakdowns as a team. We don’t want to get loose when we get a big lead, we want to try to play the same way all the time.”
- Let’s keep one thing in mind: the Blues just played the night before. The Canucks were facing a tired team on the second half of back-to-back games — something they’ll be doing a lot this season. That doesn’t erase the Canucks’ dominance, but it does put it in context. The big test for the Canucks will be how they play when they are the tired team on the second half of back-to-backs, as they will be on Saturday against the New York Rangers.
