How many kids got tickets to this game under the tree at Christmas? After tonight, do they think that Santa Claus — or their mom and dad — hates them? Are they cursing Christmas and declaring that they’ll never celebrate the holiday again?
Thursday night’s game between the Vancouver Canucks and Philadelphia Flyers felt like it was a gift from Krampus, the horned hominid who would accompany Santa and punish wicked children with birch rods. Krampus was replaced wholesale by the Flyers’ team and had upgraded their birch rods to carbon fiber rods but the punishment was just as severe.
It’s not just that the Canucks lost. The Canucks haven’t done much losing on home ice, so the loss stings, but it’s more that they lost in such a dreadfully boring manner.
It was a bad hockey game with a single, two-minute blip of excitement when the Flyers scored three straight goals, which simply added to the drudgery for Canucks fans.
“Bad first period. We weren’t invested; they were,” said head coach Rick Tocchet. “Then the second, I thought we came back a little bit and then that five-minute explosion: those three goals, huge mistakes.”
The Flyers played like they were simply waiting for the Canucks to make a mistake. They clogged up the middle of the ice, closed out space in the neutral zone, and let the Canucks force plays. And the Canucks, perhaps accustomed to piling up goals with aplomb, made the exact mistakes the Flyers were looking for.
“I think that’s a fair assessment,” said Ian Cole, “in the sense that sometimes — especially when we had a couple of chances early, open nets or whatever — we’re like, ‘Man, this game should be two-nothing right now or this game should be three-one, why isn’t it?’ and we want to try to manifest that when it’s maybe not the right time or situation.”
Instead of biding their time and finding a gap in the Flyers’ armour like Bard did with Smaug in the Battle of Lake-town, they instead hurled themselves headlong at the dragon and got burned.
“You’ve got to prepare yourself to win one-nothing,” said Nikita Zadorov. “That’s playoff hockey, you’ve got to stick with it. You’ve got to grind, grind — it could take 59 minutes to score a goal.”
“We’ve got to be comfortable playing the zero-zero game,” said Tocchet. “You know, who cares? Just take what’s given. You can’t get frustrated because people are in your way or people are hitting you — you cannot get frustrated because it’s going to get ramped up even more.”
There was no room for the Canucks to maneuver on the ice, no time and space for their top players to assert themselves with their skill. The Canucks have been an exciting team this season and playing such a dull, dreary game just didn’t seem to sit right with them.
“You’ve got to keep working and working and making the smart play,” said Tocchet. “I thought a couple of times, we could have got the puck in deep and put pressure on their D. We made some east-west plays, some guys are trying to stickhandle through the whole team.
“Just things that we don’t like and most of the year we haven’t done that as much, but I felt tonight, a handful of times, we did some dumb things.”
Like the Canucks, I also did some dumb things on Thursday, starting with the fact that I watched this game.
- The Canucks played a good road period in the first. Took the home crowd right out of it.
- Casey DeSmith got the start for the Canucks, which was a bit of a surprise coming off a long break with their next game not for another five days. But DeSmith has been excellent in recent starts, while Thatcher Demko has given up 11 goals in his last three starts, with a save percentage under .900 in each of them. Giving Demko a little more practice time to reset isn’t a bad idea.
- DeSmith wasn’t the problem for the Canucks in this game. He was sharp in the first period, bailing out Nikita Zadorov after an unforced turnover behind the net. DeSmith charged out and made a blocker save on Travis Konecny and Zadorov didn’t make another mistake for the rest of the game. I’m lying.
- Zadorov had a flat-out terrible game. The Canucks were out-shot 8-to-3 when he was on the ice at 5-on-5 and a lot of it had to do with his poor puck management. Of the Canucks trying to force plays that weren’t there, Zadorov was the play-forcingest.
- The Flyers took away the Canucks’ time and space with the puck, but the Canucks also didn’t earn it. “It’s owning that time and space,” said Tocchet. “It’s winning a battle, it’s boxing out, it’s making a smart play, it’s getting the puck in deep and getting on the forecheck…The game’s not played with one or two steamboats, take your time — it doesn’t work.”
- Somehow, Scott Laughton barreling into DeSmith like he was thrown by Donkey Kong doesn’t count as goaltender interference. Why not? Your guess is as good as mine.
- There were two highlights in the first period. The first is that Markus Näslund was in the building and he received a rousing standing ovation from the Rogers Arena crowd. It was fantastic to see Näslund get that kind of response and he seemed legitimately moved by the cheers.
- The second highlight was Quinn Hughes making a fantastic defensive play without his stick. Hughes seemed to have his stick broken in an altercation with Joel Farabee at the blue line, but stuck with the play, tracking back to the front of the net and making a kick save (and a beauty) to prevent a backdoor pass to Bobby Brink.
- I’ve talked a lot about the Canucks making mistakes but the first mistake that started the Flyers’ two-minute scoring surge was made by the referees, who saw Owen Tippett skate into Tyler Myers and fall down and made the assumption that Myers must have done something nefarious to cause Tippett to fall down. After all, Myers is so very, very tall.
- The Flyers opened the scoring on the subsequent power play. Egor Zamula threw the puck towards the net and it skipped into the corner of the net past a screened DeSmith. It was Zamula’s second goal of the season, second of his entire career, and second goal against the Canucks. He scored his first against the Canucks back on October 17, and it was also the game’s opening goal.
- Just over a minute later, the Flyers burst out of their zone on a 3-on-2 and both Filip Hronek and Quinn Hughes played it like it was a 2-on-2, aggressively attacking the strong side of the ice and leaving Sean Walker wide open on the weak side. Tippet swatted the puck across to Walker, who made like he was on a paleo diet and went against the grain, beating a sliding DeSmith.
- 30-or-so seconds after that, Zadorov skated himself directly into two Flyers in the neutral zone, turning over the puck and giving Farabee a breakaway. Farabee made a lovely move to deke out DeSmith, who went DeSliding right out of DeNet as Farabee pulled the puck back and tucked it in. Just like that, three goals in 2:06.
- “It was two goals in a row and we needed a better shift,” said Zadorov. “So, it’s on me, for sure. It’s hard to get back in a game when you’re down three…I mean, we turned it over a lot. I think we didn’t have speed, we weren’t connected on the ice, especially in the first period.”
- The Canucks showed a spark early in the third period and the flint and steel were once again provided by the Good Job Boys: Conor Garland, Dakota Joshua, and Teddy Blueger. Tyler Myers poked a puck off Konecny’s stick in the defensive zone and Quinn Hughes sent Joshua in on the left wing. As Garland drove to the back post, taking a defender with him, Blueger lagged behind as the trailer, unmarked because Konecny had shaded towards Hughes. Joshua slipped the puck to Blueger and he blew it past Samuel Ersson.
- Weirdly, Ersson left the game a couple of minutes later, reportedly for dehydration. In came a cold Carter Hart. It seemed like things were lining up for a comeback, particularly after Noah Juulsen drew a penalty after hammering Farabee into the boards. Cam Atkinson attacked, tackling Juulsen to the ice to earn an extra two minutes for roughing.
- The comeback never came. Instead, the Flyers scored shorthanded, letting all of the air out of the building like a dad sitting on a whoopee cushion. Ryan Poehling out-raced Hughes to a puck in the Canucks’ zone and Brock Boeser completely lost track of Garnet Hathaway in front of the net. DeSmith made a big save on Hathaway’s first shot but couldn’t do anything about the second.
- Boeser made things worse midway through the third period with an awful tripping penalty in the offensive zone. It was a rough night for Boeser, who earlier flubbed a power play chance set up by Andrei Kuzmenko, golfing the puck up and over the net. Look, the guy’s second in the NHL in goalscoring, he’s allowed one flub. But only one.
- Tocchet shook up the lines as the game progressed, looking for a spark. When asked if he had seen something from the players promoted up the lineup, Tocchet was blunt: “I didn’t see anything from anybody. Just trying to get people going.”
- The Canucks’ top-six just couldn’t get anything going in this game, struggling to work their way to the middle of the ice against the Flyers. While it’s great that the third line has been contributing so much offensively, the Canucks won’t get far if their top-six gets throttled.
- “Those guys are going to have to get used to it because teams are going to check them even harder,” said Tocchet. “They’ve got to understand that we’re gonna have to play certain styles sometimes. If things aren’t going your way, you’re gonna have to play a north style and just chip away at it.”
- This wasn’t the best way to come out of the Christmas break, but let’s be clear: it’s just one game. The Canucks have done well this season at bouncing back from losses and they’ve lost two-straight games just twice this season and have yet to lose three-straight games.
- “It’s one game. We’re not going to let this compound into a ten-game losing streak,” said Cole, then added, “Hopefully.” As he was walking out of the locker room, he grimaced and said, “Hope I don’t have to eat my words on that one.”
- “We’re all disappointed in the loss,” said Tocchet. “We’ve just got to make sure that this doesn’t fester, that’s all.”
