Three of the top-ten scorers in the NHL are Vancouver Canucks and a fourth Canuck is currently top-five in goalscoring.
But a playoff team can’t solely depend on top-end scoring to carry them every single game. Fortunately, the Canucks actually have some decent depth this season, depth that was vital to beat the Seattle Kraken on Friday night.
Four of the Canucks’ five goals were scored by bottom-six forwards and the fifth was scored by the second power play unit, so it felt like a bottom-six goal in spirit. That’s how you cruise to a 5-1 win over a Pacific Division rival while not getting a single point from Elias Pettersson, J.T. Miller, and Brock Boeser.
“That’s huge. You want everyone to contribute,” said Teddy Blueger, who scored his first goal as a Canuck. “It’s tough to just rely on a few guys the whole year.”
It was an impressive performance by the Canucks’ bottom-six, particularly since some of them did a lot with little time on ice. Nils Höglander had under 11 minutes in ice time. Even Sam Lafferty, despite being temporarily elevated into a top-six role with Andrei Kuzmenko scratched, played just 12:28. And yet, both of them scored.
“It’s a hard job,” said Canucks head coach Rick Tocchet. “Sometimes, you’re going to have to sit there for five minutes and you have to be able — and that’s what good teams do — you’ve got to have those players that can sit there for five and get out there and contribute. Like Höggy: he sat there because of all those penalties, it’s tough to get your legs going. And that was a helluva goal for us from him.”
Only one Canucks line stayed intact in Tocchet’s line shuffling heading into this game — Dakota Joshua, Teddy Blueger, and Conor Garland — and deservedly so, as that line has been excellent. Lo and behold, Joshua and Blueger each scored a goal, while Garland picked up two assists.
“I think they’ve been good the last four, five, six games,” said Tocchet. “Hashmark down, they’ve been one of our better lines. I don’t really see many turnovers from them, I thought Teddy was great, Dakota’s been playing better every game, and it’s nice to see Gars get a couple points. Gars deserves a few more points, he’s been playing good. That line deserved to stay together.”
Call this a bottom-six appreciation game, as their goalscoring gave everyone cause to be thankful for everything else they do that gets less noticed.
Garland, Joshua, and Blueger are the Canucks’ top three players in expected goals percentage. Nils Höglander has the best goal share on the team at 5-on-5, with the Canucks outscoring their opposition 14-to-3 when he’s on the ice. Joshua is sixth in the NHL in hits.
“To me, it’s their forechecking that really tilts the ice,” said Tocchet. “They can hem the other lines in. They’re not one-and-done and I think this year we’re getting a lot of good forechecking from the bottom-six.”
They got a lot of good things from the bottom-six when I watched this game.
- Tocchet’s best post-game comment of the night was his straight-faced, “I think everybody’s waiting for us to fall apart. These are nice wins.”
- The new-look line of Phil Di Giuseppe, Nils Åman, and Nils Höglander was the illest line since “I’ma set it straight, this Watergate” because they clearly had that ill communication. The Nils Twins showed immediate chemistry with The Delivery Boy, as Di Giuseppe’s hard forecheck three minutes in led directly to Åman setting up Höglander for a great chance. It was a harbinger of things to come.
- “I thought Åman was great. He’s been great down in Abbotsford,” said Tocchet after Åman's two-assist game to celebrate his new two-year contract. “He really balanced the lines for us tonight.”
- Do you think Phil Di Giuseppe could convinced to change his name to Nils Di Giuseppe? Too soon after just one game together as a line? Fine.
- The Canucks were flying in the first period until a series of penalties took the wind out of their sails. That may sound like a mixed metaphor, but little do you know that what the Canucks were flying was the Hummingbird from Shadow and Bone.
- Not to worry: the penalty kill opened the scoring. First, Joshua was stopped on a breakaway set up by Noah Juulsen, and then Blueger picked off a pass in the neutral zone to storm in on a breakaway of his own. He froze Joey Daccord with a fake shot, then cut to the backhand to make it 1-0.
- The Kraken appeared to respond on their second power play of the game, with Matty Beniers firing a puck top corner, but the goal was challenged by the Canucks and overturned. Turns out, Jaden Schwartz was ever-so-slightly offside on the zone entry 19 seconds earlier. It’s not the first time a Schwartz has slightly crossed the line.
- The most ludicrous of the Canucks’ first-period penalties was Tyler Myers somehow managing to take out two players with one high stick. He tried to check Jordan Eberle but his stick came up and smacked not just Eberle in the mouth but J.T. Miller too. Thankfully, you can’t get penalties for high-sticking your own players, so it was just a double minor instead of a quadruple minor for Myers.
- A big part of the Canucks’ successful penalty kill was Thatcher Demko, with his best save an unconventional one to rob Kailer Yamamoto on a point-blank chance. Yamamoto elevated the puck, looking for the top of the net, but Demko, seemingly intentionally, got his mask on the shot to deflect it high. To quote Jay Onrait, “That’s using your face!”
- Late in the first period, Brandon Tanev tried to check Höglander in the neutral zone and it did not go well for him. Höglander went through Tanev like Miley Cyrus through a brick wall, possibly aggravating a previous leg injury for Tanev in the process. It was a clean hit but Tanev did not return to the game. You know it's a huge hit when the guy's stick goes flying: Tanev's stick was still in the air when he started to get up from the ice.
- Brock Boeser got chance after chance in this game but couldn’t buy a goal. He had seven shot attempts; six of them were considered scoring chances by the reckoning of Natural Stat Trick. But the hockey gods took one look at his goal totals this season and his sky-high shooting percentage and went, “Hang on, that can’t be right; I thought we cursed this guy,” and made sure none of his chances went in.
- Demko was very good in the first period; he was stupendous in the second. The Kraken had eight shots in the second period before the Canucks managed one but Demko kept the Kraken off the board until the Canucks regained their feet. You can just call him The Bucket, because he bailed out Ian Cole after a dreadful turnover up the middle for his biggest save of the period.
- Please don’t actually call him The Bucket. I suspect he wouldn’t appreciate that.
- Joshua had a beast of a shift en route to the 2-0 goal. He was on the ice for 1:22 before he scored. The shift started with setting up Boeser for a scoring chance in transition, then he threw a stiff check on Eeli Tolvanen in the offensive zone. A minute later, he was still on the ice and still battling, carrying the puck in deep and holding off two Kraken checkers along the boards. As he considered going off on a change, he stopped by the front of the net, boxed out Alex Wennberg, and banged in a Garland rebound.
- The Kraken got one back before the end of the second period off a turnover. Elias Pettersson couldn’t reel in Ilya Mikheyev’s breakout pass and the puck was held in by Vince Dunn. Filip Hronek, who was looking to join the rush a moment earlier, took too long to pick up Tye Kartye, who flung a shot past the unintentional screen of Ian Cole to beat Demko.
- Noah Juulsen made a couple of big mistakes in this game, including a turnover behind his own net in the first period and a bad pinch in the second period, but Demko bailed him out both times. Juulsen returned the favour with a huge shot block early in the third period, throwing himself in front of a Jared McCann shot off a faceoff and taking the puck squarely off the back of the right leg. I guess that’s why he’s still in the lineup: every team needs a guy with blatant disregard for his own well-being.
- Midway through the third period, the Canucks had three offensive zone faceoffs in a row. Elias Pettersson won the first two, leading to two Ian Cole point shots. Tocchet had seen enough: before the third faceoff, he replaced Cole and Juulsen with Quinn Hughes and Filip Hronek. Pettersson won the third faceoff, Hughes set up Hronek for the slap shot, and Lafferty tipped it in. Coach of the year, give him the Jack Adams now.
- “Coler was funny. After we scored, he goes, ‘Yep, just get Ian Cole off the ice on those plays,’” said Tocchet. “Petey won three draws in a row and, obviously, Hronek’s got a laser, but Coler, after we scored, was pretty funny.”
- The Nilses got on the board later in the third. Åman protected the puck on the boards in the defensive zone, then chipped it up the boards to spring Höglander on a 2-on-1 with Garland. Höglander looked towards Garland as if he was going to pass, then snapped his head hard towards the net and snapped the puck even harder, sending it just under Daccord’s glove.
- The Canucks dominated the third period, protecting the lead largely by keeping the puck out of the Kraken’s hands. Seattle didn’t get their first shot on goal in the period until there were fewer than five minutes remaining and the Canucks had a three-goal lead. Like bizarre imagery in The Garden of Earthly Delights, the Canucks were all over the final frame.
- “It was one of our better periods for just game management of the puck,” said Tocchet. “It was a professional third period, I really liked it.”
- Just after a power play expired, the second power play unit chipped in the 5-1 goal. Garland gifted Mikheyev a tap-in at the backdoor to put a pretty bow on a win that wasn’t pretty at all. This was a gritty, ugly win and exactly the type of win the Canucks will need every now and then if they fancy themselves a contender.
