The Vancouver Canucks have been getting a lot of bounces all season long.
The Canucks lead the NHL in PDO, a statistic that combines shooting percentage and save percentage at 5-on-5 and is often used as a proxy for luck. Their 12.27% shooting percentage at 5-on-5 is nearly 1.5 percentage points higher than the next best team.
No team has ever finished a season with a 5-on-5 shooting percentage above 11%, so surely the Canucks are going to regress toward something a little bit more within the bounds of human capability at some point. Right? The fear is that the bounces will eventually dry up or start to go the other way.
Instead, on Tuesday night against the Ottawa Senators, the bounces bounced the Canucks way harder than ever.
The Canucks scored on a puck that banked off the end boards and was grabbed out of mid-air; a puck that banked off the back of the goaltender, slid along the line, and was kicked out only to land right on the stick of the man who first shot it; a point shot that took a double deflection off a Senators defenceman; and a flubbed one-timer that was accidentally tipped in by that same defenceman.
Those were all in just the first period. The goals were coming so fast and furious that it’s completely understandable that some members of the media in press row might have missed a detail or two.
Or, as J.T. Miller more bluntly put it, “You should watch the game, Drancer.”
To top it all off, just when the Senators looked like they were mounting a comeback, the Canucks ended it with the most absurd goal of all: a gentle flip towards the net that bounced right over the goaltender’s glove.
There was no denying it: the Canucks got lucky.
But luck doesn’t just happen in a void. You can’t get a bounce if you never send a puck towards the net. The Canucks played a dominant first period, creating chance after chance.
“A couple of lucky bounces went our way but I felt we earned them,” said Miller and he was absolutely right.
“I thought it was great, one of our better periods, I think, this year,” said Elias Pettersson. “Everybody was doing their job, playing fast, and playing for each other.”
To be fair, it was literally the first period of the year, so it had better have been one of their better periods of the year. It was also one of their best periods of the season, the kind of start that would surely have resulted in the Canucks winning the game even without the absurd bounces.
In fact, the bounces might have been a bad thing, as the 5-0 lead caused the Canucks to let up the rest of the game and give the Senators a chance to come back. Without the bounces, maybe the Canucks exit the first period with just a 1-0 or 2-0 lead and play the entire 60 minutes with the same intensity that they started with.
But they didn’t play the entire game the same way they did the first period. I know that because, unlike Thomas Drance, I watched this game.
- For those who think any of the above Drance roasting is in anything other than jest, know that Drance watches the game closer than anyone I know. Anyone that thinks he only looks at the stats doesn’t know what they’re talking about. If he had looked at the stats, he would have known exactly which defenceman assisted on Miller’s goal.
- It looked like Nils Höglander was going to be a healthy scratch for this game but head coach Rick Tocchet instead decided to scratch the other Nils, Nils Åman. That meant nil Åmans on the ice for the Canucks.
- Phil Di Giuseppe started the game on the wing with Miller and Brock Boeser but left the game after three shifts. Tocchet suggested that Di Giuseppe will be out “for a while.” Since Di Giuseppe didn’t seem to take any hard hits on his final shift, it’s possible it was a non-contact injury — a tweak or a tear of a muscle or ligament — which can often be more serious than a contact injury.
- “We’ll probably have a lineup change in St. Louis with Di Giuseppe out,” said Tocchet. “We have to probably call somebody up and maybe the guy that gets called up will be in the lineup. There’s going to be three, four, or five guys that are gonna get rotated out — I’m looking for someone to establish some stuff out there.”
- Ian Cole made a New Year’s Resolution to score his first goal of the season in 2024 — “Having a zero next to my name is so annoying” — and he immediately fulfilled it. He took a pass from Noah Juulsen, flung the puck through traffic, and found the net past Anton Forsberg.
- “I said it tongue in cheek and then it worked out, so maybe this resolution thing, there’s something to it,” said Cole, then agreed he needed to up his goal for the year. “You can’t complete your resolution on day two. New year, new me, so we’ll see what happens. I’ll shoot the puck a little more, maybe it’ll go in, I don’t know.”
- “He shoots a lot of pucks from up there so it’s nice to see one go in,” said Miller with a chuckle. “I think we had some good traffic. I’m happy for him.”
- The Canucks got a lot of absurd bounces but the one they didn’t get might have been the absurdest one of them all. Off the rush, Teddy Blueger’s shot went whistling wide but then hit the backboards and tumbled back towards the net, hitting the back of the crossbar and popping up into the air in front of the net. If Forsberg hadn’t been alert to snag it, the puck could have landed right in the crease or gone off his back and in.
- The live boards were a Chekhov’s Gun that immediately went off. Tyler Myers sent a slap pass to Sam Lafferty and his deflection went high over the net and off the boards. Suter went up for the rebound off the glass like Dennis Rodman, snagged it with his hand, dropped it to his stick, and sent the putback jam into the net.
- Pettersson’s 3-0 goal came after he stole the puck on the forecheck and made a neat stick lift to gain some space with the puck. Spotting some daylight between Forsberg and the post, he tried to bank the puck in and nearly succeeded, as it squiggled along the top of Forsberg’s pad and landed on the goal line. Forsberg kicked the puck away but Pettersson had already hustled to the other side of the net and intercepted the kick to finish the job.
- 24 seconds later, Miller got some luck to make it 4-0. Nikita Zadorov fired a point shot that Miller deflected. The puck would have gone sailing into the corner but it instead hit Jake Sanderson in the hip and went in. It was the biggest hip hit since “In View.”
- To add to the Senators' misery, Zack MacEwen picked up a two-minute minor and a ten-minute misconduct for trying to pick a momentum-shifting fight with Noah Juulsen. But Juulsen is no fool, son, and was having none of it. Instead, the Canucks’ power play went to work against Joonas Korpisalo, who came into the game for Forsberg.
- The Canucks’ power play, of course, scored an absurdly lucky goal. The setup was lovely, as the Canucks zipped the puck around and found the passing lane they wanted with Miller sending a diagonal, cross-seam pass to Pettersson. The finish was awful, as Pettersson heeled the shot and sent it skittering wide, only for it to hit Sanderson’s stick and slide five-hole between Forsberg’s legs to make it 5-0.
- Pettersson almost seemed embarrassed to have scored on such a lousy shot, giving a chagrined shrug. “I’ll take it every day,” said Pettersson after the game. “It’s just one of those lucky ones, where it’s like, I don’t know — it’s my natural reaction.”
- Wayne Gretzky was in the building with, of all people, Chad Kroeger from Nickelback. Canucks owner Francesco Aquilini was also there. Gretzky got a huge standing ovation when the scoreboard showed him in the lower bowl and Kroeger stood up and pumped up the crowd during a rousing sing-along of “How You Remind Me” in the third period. And Francesco Aquilini was also there.
- Also, shout out to this itchy-necked Canucks fan who was pleased as punch to be on-camera during an intermission interview and then had the sudden realization of who was being interviewed: “Dude, that’s f***ing Markus Näslund.”
- The Canucks made things harder for Demko than they needed to be in the second and third periods, as they got a little bit casual with the large lead. That forced Demko to come up with some big saves, with his best came with a little over a minute left, as he lunged to his left and robbed Thomas Chabot with his glove, leaving no fingerprints for the police.
- “He shouldn’t have to make post-to-post [saves], we shouldn’t be leaving our feet on a 2-on-1 — things like that,” said Tocchet. “It should have been an easier night for Thatch.”
- Claude Giroux wasn’t going to let the Senators go quietly. He took advantage of a bad Canucks line change to get the Senators on the board with a nasty toe-drag around Ilya Mikheyev that also froze Thatcher Demko, giving him the entire net to shoot at. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but sometimes an old dog knows old tricks that still work just fine.
- Giroux then set up a Vladimir Tarasenko goal early in the third period to give the Senators some life. Defending a 2-on-1, Filip Hronek went to the ice far too early, allowing Giroux to simply wait for Hronek to slide past like a shot glass in Hot Tub Time Machine before feeding Tarasenko for the tap-in goal.
- Tarasenko grabbed one more goal, capitalizing on a puck that squirted out of a scrum to him at the backdoor, making it a two-goal game to give Canucks fans a few heart palpitations, just for fun.
- The potential comeback was nipped in the bud but Pius Suter, who stole the puck from Drake Batherson and casually flipped the puck on net, hoping Korpisalo would freeze the puck for an offensive zone faceoff. Instead, Korpisalo whiffed on the puck entirely like he was Dan Cloutier trying to stop Nicklas Lidstrom from centre ice.
- Nils Höglander seemed to take his potential scratching in stride and didn’t let it shake his confidence. He bowled over Thomas Chabot down the right wing at one point, casually knocking the much bigger defenceman to the ice like it was nothing.
- That was far from Höglander’s most confident moment. Early in the third period, Höglander got the puck behind the net, hoisted it onto his stick, and flipped the puck over the net. He was either looking for Suter in front or just trying to bank it in off the back of Korpisalo’s head. It was an audacious move but given the absurd bounces that had already worked out for the Canucks, it seems pretty reasonable for Höglander to expect it to work.
- “That’s just Nils being Nils,” said Pettersson with a smile. “There was someone in front of the net, so if their guy doesn’t take it with their hand, then I think it’s a good play. It’s fun to see.”
- Honestly, Jacob Bernard-Docker looked like he closed his hand on the puck when he grabbed Höglander’s pass, and closing your hand on the puck in the crease is supposed to be a penalty shot. We’ll let it go just this once, Bernard-Docker, and only because the Canucks won 6-3 anyway.
