Our long provincial nightmare is over; the Vancouver Canucks have won a game.
Yes, it took overtime, and yes, it was against a Florida Panthers team that was missing its two best players in Aleksander Barkov and Matthew Tkachuk, and yes, it required some massive saves by Kevin Lankinen, but a win is a win.
“The longer you go without a win, I think you just add a little pressure to yourself and the team,” said J.T. Miller. “It’s nice that we can hopefully take a deep breath moving forward through the road trip.”
What really matters, of course, is what the Canucks do next.
After four games, the Canucks have four points in the standings. Through four games last season, the Canucks had four points. Sure, those four points felt different since they came from two regulation wins, including an 8-1 decimation of the rival Oilers, but there were some serious causes for concern then too.
After a pair of wins against the Oilers last season, the Canucks dropped two ugly games on the road that saw them get badly outplayed by the Philadelphia Flyers and the Tampa Bay Lightning, with all sorts of ugly mistakes and bad turnovers. The Canucks looked like a mess.
Then they went out and won 10 of their next 12 games, storming their way to the top of the NHL standings. That road trip is where the Canucks honed in on the business-like approach that would carry them through the rest of the season.
Can this season’s Canucks do the same?
There were flashes of brilliance in the Canucks win over the Panthers — things that the Canucks can build on beyond just winning the game. Now the Canucks have to turn those flashes into consistently blinding LED high beams.
“We’ve got some work to do but I thought there was some good stuff in there,” said head coach Rick Tocchet. “There were times where we had good possession time and had some chances.”
It’s a start. Speaking of, I should probably start writing about how I watched this game.
- The Canucks’ stars led the way in this one. Quinn Hughes was dominant, Elias Pettersson had his best game of the season, Brock Boeser had chance after chance, and J.T. Miller had a signature J.T. Miller moment to win the game in overtime. Hopefully the stars come out more frequently for the Canucks this season than they do for the planet Lagash.
- The one star still missing is Thatcher Demko but Kevin Lankinen did a decent Demko impression in net for the Canucks, making a multitude of fantastic stops. He did get himself in trouble a little bit when he left the net to play the puck but he always recovered, even if it sometimes meant making some unorthodox saves, like his butterfly save on Mackie Samoskevich while facing the back wall six feet from his net. As they say, if it’s stupid but it works, it’s not stupid.
- Kiefer Sherwood seemed personally offended that he wasn’t leading the NHL in hits coming into this game, as he was breaking more bodies than Hal and Joanne. He had a whopping 10 hits in this game, vaulting him up to third in the NHL overall and first among forwards in hits per game.
- “We acquired [Sherwood] because he’s a really good forechecker,” said Tocchet. “He’s fitting in well. Being that first forechecking guy, he’ll take the body. That’s a good thing for us.”
- Shout out to longtime PITB commenter Chris the Curmudgeon, who called for the Canucks to acquire Sherwood nearly a year ago, even if only because of his name. Regrettably, Sherwood doesn’t use a Sherwood stick; he uses a CCM JetSpeed FT6.
- Teddy Blueger has been one of the Canucks’ best players to start the season, which is good for Blueger but bad for the Canucks. Blueger opened the scoring, if only just barely. He jumped on a Sherwood rebound and smartly didn’t just jam the puck on goal but instead cut behind the net for a backhand wraparound. Sergei Bobrovsky whipped out his right skate to kick the puck away but not before it went a centimeter over the goal line, with even Blueger having to admit he never saw it go in and still hadn’t after the game.
- “I actually haven’t seen a replay,” said Blueger. “I was coming around the net — I thought I had him — and then it seemed like he saved it, so I was a little disappointed in myself that I didn’t score. Then I came to the bench and guys were saying it went in. At that point, I was just praying and hoping it went in.”
- The video review for the goal lasted a full minute; the lead lasted 11 seconds. Off the subsequent faceoff, the Panthers dumped the puck in deep, Samoskevitch recovered it, and set up a backdoor goal for Jesper Boqvist in less time than it took you to finish reading this entire sentence. Nils Åman left Boqvist alone behind him to tie up A.J. Greer in front, who was Filip Hronek’s man. It’s the kind of defensive lapse that Daniel Sprong might make, only without the potential for scoring a goal at the other end of the ice.
- The line of Nils Höglander, Elias Pettersson, and Conor Garland was buzzing all game. Pettersson was kept off the scoresheet but his playmaking was on point, as he set up some great chances. He also came inches from his first goal of the season, hitting the crossbar on a pass from Höglander. It feels like a breakout performance is right around the corner.
- Ironically, the best chance that Pettersson created was for the player who was pulled off his line for this game, Jake DeBrusk. Pettersson drew all the attention before slipping the puck to DeBrusk alone in the slot, only for DeBrusk to make like Ilya Mikheyev and shovel the puck directly into the goaltender’s pads.
- Early in the second period, Lankinen did what Bobrovsky could not, as he kept an Evan Rodrigues wraparound from crossing the goal line with his right skate. On the exact spot where Blueger scored, Lankinen got the puck trapped in between his skate and the top of his pad and pushed it just past the post.
- Even if he couldn’t stop Blueger, Bobrovsky was brilliant in the Panther net. He was robbing so much that Officer Bobrovsky nearly got kicked off the force until he reminded them that robbery is actually official policy under administrative forfeiture laws. You’re back on the case, Bobrovsky!
- Quinn Hughes had more shots than a bridesmaid at a bachelorette party, with 14 shot attempts, 9 of which were on goal. That’s a new career high in shots on goal as he looks to make good on his goal to score 20 goals this season. I feel like I used the word “goal” too much in that previous sentence and should go right to gaol.
- Hughes scored his first goal of the season with two of his 14 shot attempts. His first was blocked by Sam Bennett but he quickly recovered the puck and, with Bennett momentarily out of commission, Hughes jumped up from the point and hammered a slap shot past a Nils Åman screen and under Bobrovsky’s blocker. Look out, NHL: Hughes’ slap shot is a legitimate weapon now.
- The Panthers absurdly challenged the goal suggesting that there should have been a stoppage for a hand pass off the faceoff. When the linesman dropped the puck, it deflected off Åman’s hand, sure. But his hand was holding his stick. If that’s a hand pass, that opens up a massive can of worms. Fortunately, sanity prevailed and the goal stood.
- Blueger was fired up in this game, to the point that he dropped the gloves with a Panther during a post-whistle scrum for just his second fight in the past four seasons. Only, he didn’t realize it was his fellow Latvian and friend, Uvis Balinskis. Blueger and Balinskis were teammates on the Latvian national team at the 2017, 2018, and 2019 World Championships, as well as in Olympic qualifying in 2021. The two exchanged some less violent physical contact after the game.
- “We’re friends, we just caught up a little bit,” said Blueger. “I actually didn’t realize it was him at the start. Just a heat of the moment thing, obviously nothing crazy, not much of a fight.”
- Erik Brännström made his Canucks debut and clearly doesn’t quite have the trust of the Canucks coaching staff yet. He played just 11:49 in a sheltered third-pairing role, leaving Hughes to play 26:58. So far this season, Hughes is averaging over 27 minutes per game, which is second only to Roman Josi. That doesn’t seem sustainable; John Carlson led the NHL last season with 25:54 per game.
- Brännström was mostly fine but he did make one glaring error in the second period that forced Lankinen to make one of his best stops. The initial breakaway wasn’t his fault — Carson Soucy tried to leave the ice on a horribly timed line change — but Brännström made it worse. He needed to recognize the danger and stop at the top of the crease to protect the front of the net. Instead, he chased the puck into the corner, leaving Lankinen to deal with a 2-on-0 in front.
- Soucy has struggled to start the season and another unforced error led to the tying goal. On a Panthers power play, Soucy overcommitted into the corner to throw a hit on Carter Verhaege, taking both of them out of the play. That left the other penalty killers dealing with a 4-on-3 situation and Anton Lundell walked into the space vacated by Soucy and placed a perfect shot under Lankinen’s blocker.
- You have to laugh at mismatch in vibes between Vincent Desharnais and Quinn Hughes as the high-energy Desharnais tried to hype up his low-energy captain ahead of the third period. You don’t understand, Desharnais; you haven’t seen The Horrors.
- Höglander came agonizingly close to restoring the Canucks’ lead midway through the third period but rung the inside of the post instead. It came off a gorgeous pass by Conor Garland on a 2-on-1, as he sold the shot like a charismatic bartender before sliding the no-look feed across to Höglander.
- I always love seeing coaches and players hashing out x’s and o’s on the bench during games. After a commercial break, the cameras caught Tocchet working out a breakout and zone entry play with Boeser and Miller that seemed a lot more like a discussion than a coach dictating the play. That type of back-and-forth is great to see, especially since that line executed a flawless transition up ice to create a chance on their very next shift.
- That line, incidentally, had Jake DeBrusk on it, as the winger was bumped up to the top line for Arshdeep Bains in the third period. That’s a line that seems like it could stick around, especially if Höglander and Garland keep playing with Pettersson.
- The Panthers made the odd decision of only using forwards in overtime, with not one of the seven defencemen they dressed seeing the ice in the extra frame. There’s merit to the idea in theory, as 3-on-3 overtime is practically positionless; in practice, it didn’t work out well for the Panthers, as it turns out that defencemen are frequently better than forwards at the thing that’s in their name: defence.
- Hughes and Miller took advantage of the three-forward set presented by the Panthers. Hughes rushed up ice, looking like he wanted to gain the zone himself, then buttonhooked back over the blue line and dropped the puck to Miller, who came firing up the ice from the defensive zone like he was being accelerated in a railgun. He attacked Lundell, who was not prepared to defend a full-speed Miller, then cut the puck back to his forehand and sniped the top corner with a sublime shot.
- “Honestly, Huggy sets it all up,” said MIller. “We wanted him to take it up as far as you can, just to create a little less gap and try to catch somebody flat-footed and it’s just whether you bear down on the chance or not. We’ve been talking a lot about overtime lately, so we tried something a little different and it happened to work.”
- Miller got two distinct responses: the Canucks jostled his helmet in much the same way that Miller jostles everyone else’s helmet when they score a great goal; meanwhile, one dude in a Bobrovsky jersey made like Strong Bad and gave Miller the double deuce.
- With that, Canucks fans across the world can take a deep breath and relax — they’re not the last team in the NHL without a win. No, that honour goes to the expected-to-be-terrible San Jose Sharks and two teams that were supposed to be among the best teams in the Western Conference: the Nashville Predators and the Colorado Avalanche. Man, hockey is weird.
