In a must-win game, the Vancouver Canucks gave it their all. It wasn’t enough.
The Canucks kept up with the Cup-contending Minnesota Wild through two periods but seemed to run out of gas in the third, succumbing to the Wild’s relentless puck pressure. It was like four months of constantly playing for their lives all caught up to the Canucks in one twenty-minute period.
With the loss, the Canucks’ already long odds became longer than the Nile and you’d have to be in denial to have any kind of optimism that the Canucks can still make the playoffs. The number of things that would need to fall the Canucks’ way beggars the imagination.
The Canucks deserve all kinds of credit for this late run they went on and, as long as the Canucks kept winning, or at least picking up points, a miracle felt possible. They even had a lead late in the second period until Thatcher Demko, the team’s MVP this season and the reason why they won so many games this season, allowed a very uncharacteristic goal against to tie the game heading into the third.
In the words of Michael from The Good Place, “This is a real low point. Yeah, this one hurts. Ow.”
You could tell that this loss affected the players deeply. Elias Pettersson, who has been the Canucks’ best player down the stretch, looked crestfallen and was at a complete loss for words.
“I don’t know what to say,” said Pettersson at one point. “Everyone tried their best. Everybody knew what was on the line tonight and everybody played and worked their hardest, I think. Yeah.”
It was a gutsy effort from the Canucks. Brad Richardson left the ice with blood gushing from his face after a high stick and he still returned to the game. J.T. Miller had to be helped off the ice after blocking a shot off his knee and he came back a few minutes later. Despite playing their third game in four nights, the Canucks kept pace with the speedy, aggressive Wild.
There’s no denying the effort level, which almost makes it hurt worse.
“It sucks, right?” said Conor Garland. “Everybody did everything they could for as long as we could to try to just keep winning games, just to try to give ourselves a chance to get in, so it’s a tough loss for that.
“A lot of guys have played hard for a long time and that won’t change for the last four, but tonight definitely hurts.”
Garland put it well — the Canucks will keep playing hard in the final four games. They’re not eliminated from playoff contention yet and that perseverance speaks well to the character of the players in the room.
“They could have given up a long time ago, the odds were so against us,” said Bruce Boudreau. “But they believed and they still believe. They’ll believe again tomorrow. Until it shows that we’re eliminated, I’m sure these guys are going to keep pushing right to the end.”
Unfortunately, I might have already seen the end when I watched this game.
- The way this game started, it looked like the Canucks were in for a nightmarish game. The Wild were all over the Canucks in the opening ten minutes and it was looking like one of a dozen other ugly first periods this season. But the Canucks pushed back hard in the latter half of the period and came out of the first period tied. Given how well the Canucks have performed in second and third periods this season, the first period went about as well as they could have hoped for.
- I’m not sure how Kevin Fiala got away with tripping Demko midway through the first period. Seems like the referees are also gearing up for the playoffs and practicing looking away from obvious penalties and feigning innocence. That’s not something you can just turn on as soon as the playoffs start.
- I won’t be posting any gifs of Brad Richardson’s injury because it looked absolutely shocking, as Richardson’s face gushed blood like the elevator in The Shining. Fortunately, it was only a broken nose, according to Boudreau. Ha, only. As if a broken nose is a perfectly pleasant occurence.
- “As far as Richie goes, he’s the consummate pro,” said Boudreau. “He’s 37 years old, doesn’t want to come out, saying that he’s got a little bit of a headache but he wants to play in the tough situations. Breaking his nose that he just got fixed again last year.”
- The first period was fought to a 0-0 standstill. The second period went completely off the rails, with both teams trading goals in rapid succession. It was, if you’ll excuse me, wild.
- The Wild opened the scoring on a series of ill-advised gambles by the Canucks that led to a 3-on-1. First, J.T. Miller was overly-aggressive with two of his linemates trapped deep in the Minnesota zone and got caught on the wrong side of the puck. Then Oliver Ekman-Larsson gambled on a neutral zone pinch and missed the puck and, on the Wild’s zone entry, Tyler Myers swung across the blue line looking for the aggressive break-up instead of recognizing the odd-man rush and playing a safer gap.
- To be fair to those three players, it was a well-executed rush up the ice by the Wild, with crisp passing, including a nifty touch pass on the zone entry by Fiala to evade Myers’ pokecheck and a pitch-perfect return pass from Frederick Gaudreau back to Fiala for the finish into the open net. It’s just hard to ignore the mistakes the Canucks made and also how Miller completely stopped skating on the backcheck.
- The Canucks wasted no time responding, with Elias Pettersson scoring his 30th goal of the season 38 seconds later to tie the game. Brad Hunt and Travis Dermott got the Wild’s defence in a twist by jumping up in the zone. Brock Boeser then swung the puck behind the net to Garland, who took a quick turn and found Pettersson, who had snuck into some open ice in the middle and made a splash with a snappy one-timer.
- The Wild took the lead back not long after. Myers took an awkward fall behind the Canucks net and struggled for the rest of the shift. He did his best to battle with Connor Dewar in front of the net but only served to accidentally screen Demko and prevent him from seeing a Jared Spurgeon shot that zipped past his glove.
- Not long after Spurgeon gave the Wild the lead, he gave the puck away to Matthew Highmore in the Wild zone. Highmore took the puck to the net, then made like Freddie Mercury and gave it a flick of the wrist, giving the Wild a dig in the ribs and a kick in the head, tying the game.
- Pettersson then clutched up and gave the Canucks their first lead. It started with Travis Dermott, who made a nifty fake pass to evade a forechecker, then hit Garland with a precision cross-ice pass to send him in on the right wing. Garland cut to the middle, protected the puck, and shot back against the grain, while Pettersson drove the net and chipped the rebound home on the backhand.
- “He’s a big game player,” said Boudreau of Pettersson. “He loves those games that are important and you can go back and look at all the games that are necessary to win and he’s the leader of the pack as far as scoring. He comes to play and it doesn’t surprise me that he’s got 13 goals in the last 12 games. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had more, he’s played that well. Hats off to him — he’s going to prove to the world very shortly how good he really is.”
- The Canucks couldn’t hang onto the lead. Ekman-Larsson got caught up ice on a bad pinch, leaving Garland covering for him while defending a 2-on-2. The Wild smartly criss-crossed to create a larger gap against Garland and Mats Zuccarello used that gap to beat Demko under the arm. That’s a goal Demko would dearly like to have back — he doesn’t allow many unscreened shots from that distance.
- It’s hard not to look at this game and wonder if Demko would have played any differently if he had been able to get a full game off on Tuesday night. If Jaroslav Halak hadn’t been injured in the first period, Demko could have stayed on the bench and been better rested for this game against the Wild. Given how well Demko has played this season, you have to wonder if fatigue played a factor in this game.
- The Wild were simply relentless in the third period. The Canucks, with their season on the line, just had no response to the size and speed of the Wild, who out-shot the Canucks 15-to-4. It didn’t help that the Canucks got into penalty trouble, starting with a completely avoidable too many men on the ice that set the tone for the period. It was an obvious one — the Canucks had three defencemen on the ice defending against a Wild rush.
- Demko is clearly tired of being poked by sticks after he’s covered the puck. Ryan Hartman gave him a couple of jabs when he clearly had the puck completely absorbed, so Demko decided that Hartman didn’t need his stick anymore, declared, “This bitch empty,” and yeeted it into oblivion.
- At one point in the third period, the Wild arena DJ cued up “Whoomp! (There It Is),” which seemed like he was just tempting fate given how Canucks fans have embraced that song with their “Bruce! (There It Is)” chant. But perhaps it was a calculated attempt to lull the Canucks into a false sense of security.
- Not long after, the Wild took the lead for good. Fiala started skating laps around the Canucks zone like he was trying out for short track speed skating in the Olympics and Brad Hunt got caught chasing him behind the net instead of taking a shortcut in front of the net to head Fiala off at the pass. Instead, Fiala had all sorts of room to circle out front and beat Demko at his leisure.
- That was all she wrote. Late in the game, the Canucks couldn’t even exit the zone to pull Demko for the extra attacker and eventually gave up the 5-3 goal on a rolling shot that skipped under Demko’s pads. Then the Canucks did get Demko out for the extra attacker and the Wild scored into the empty net to make it 6-3.
- It was a tough night for Ekman-Larsson and Myers, who were both on the ice for four goals against, all at 5-on-5. They weren’t even used in a match-up role against the Wild’s top line — that was Quinn Hughes and Luke Schenn. No, it was just a plain old awful night from the Canucks’ second pairing.
- I’m not going to lie: this kind of game is no fun to write about. An ordinary bad game is one thing; an emotionally-devastating bad game is another thing entirely.
