For the first time all season, the Vancouver Canucks have a .500 record.
Well, a Gary Bettman .500. They have still lost three games more than they’ve won but those three games were all overtime or shootout losses, so it counts as .500.
All it took was for Dakota Joshua to go HAM in the best game of his career so that the Canucks could barely beat the 8-16-5 San Jose Sharks in overtime. That’s it! That’s all it took! Why didn’t the Canucks just do that earlier?
It’s bizarre. The Canucks are 8-3-0 in their last 11 games, second in wins only to the New Jersey Devils in that time, and yet I’ve never been less confident in them as a team.
In the last three games, the Canucks have needed overtime to get past three bad teams and, particularly in the last two games, they’ve gotten those wins by playing some of the shinny-est hockey you’ll ever see in the NHL. It’s been messy, it’s been unsustainable, and it’s been wildly entertaining.
As they taught me in tautology class, a win is a win. This brand of firewagon hockey is extremely unlikely to get the Canucks to the playoffs and it certainly won’t help them win if they get there, but it’s a lot more fun for fans than watching them repeatedly cough up multi-goal leads.
But it’s awfully hard to have any faith that they can build from these wins. They can’t play the same way they played against the Sharks on Wednesday night and expect to beat teams that are actually good.
Or maybe they can? Who knows? This entire season has been an impossible-to-predict gong show. The Canucks are messy — they are the drama. They’re the one in your friend group that drags you to the club, drinks way more than they should, always forgets their wallet so you have to pay for all of the too-many drinks they had, and pukes on your shoes in the Uber ride home (that you also paid for).
And yet, your nights out with them are at least always memorable — more memorable than another night staying in watching Netflix.
I didn’t know what to think about the Canucks as I watched this game.
- Dakota Joshua had himself a game: two goals, a fight, a drawn penalty — and that was just the first period. He also had five shots on goal and even went 2-for-2 on faceoffs. And he did it all in just under 12 minutes of ice time. That’s an incredibly busy 12 minutes. He had more shots on goal in those 12 minutes than former Canucks forward Jayson Megna has had in 14 games for the Colorado Avalanche this season.
- We’ll just lightly gloss over the fact that Joshua was also on the ice for three Sharks goals in those 12 minutes and ended up minus-2 in plus/minus. The goals against weren’t really his fault but it just underlines how incredibly busy those 12 minutes were, with a total of five goals scored between the two teams. Joshua was definitely the main character of this game.
- The game got off to a horrendous start. Just 18 seconds in, Bo Horvat turned the puck over in the defensive zone and Nick Bonino tipped a Matt Benning point shot off Oliver Ekman-Larsson’s knee and in for the first goal of the game on the very first shot of the game. Between Benning and Bonino, call it a Timothy Zahn goal because it was a spectre of the Canucks’ past.
- Joshua tied up the game thanks to a rarity for the Canucks: Ekman-Larsson jumping up in the rush. The veteran defenceman took a pass from Ethan Bear and moved in on the right wing, then threw a backhand towards the net from a bad angle. Kaapo Kahkonen gave up an appallingly bad rebound and Joshua pounced on the loose puck like an ocelot and chipped it over Kahkonen on the backhand.
- A few minutes later, Joshua dropped the gloves with Radim Simek after the Shark laid a heavy hit on Nils Åman in the neutral zone. It was mostly notable because of Joshua vigorously shaking his head at the linesmen, saying, “No! No!” when they came to break up the fight, and his heavy sigh and rolled eyes when they ignored him and broke up the fight anyway.
- That’s what was particularly incredible about Joshua’s first period — he spent five minutes of it in the penalty box and just 2:20 on the ice. But with less than a minute left in the period, Joshua scored his second goal to give the Canucks the 2-1 lead. On the second power play unit in place of the scratched Sheldon Dries, Joshua banged home a puck that Conor Garland tipped off the post from an Ekman-Larsson point shot. To make it better, Joshua is the one who drew the penalty.
- Horvat made up for his first-period turnover by assisting on the first goal of the second period. He forced a turnover from Jaycob Megna in the neutral zone and pushed the puck into the offensive zone, then subtly dragged his skate to accidentally-on-purpose trip Kevin Labanc. The missed penalty gave Nils Höglander all the room he needed to snipe the puck past Kahkonen’s glove on the short side.
- The Canucks’ penalty kill remains a problem. The Sharks’ power play looked utterly dominant and hemmed in the Canucks for a minute-and-a-half leading up to their second goal of the game. Eventually, the Canucks were like Charles Meshack in Commando — dead tired — and couldn’t move their feet to get to a loose puck when a shot into traffic got blocked and Timo Meier fired a wrist shot past a scrambling Spencer Martin.
- On the very next shift, it looked like Joshua had scored his hat trick goal to restore the two-goal lead, as he drove to the net to jam in his own rebound. But the Sharks challenged it for goaltender interference and the goal was disallowed because Joshua made contact with Kahkonen and prevented him from moving freely in his crease.
- Here’s the thing: rule 69.7 states, “In a rebound situation, or where a goalkeeper and attacking player(s) are simultaneously attempting to play a loose puck, whether inside or outside the crease, incidental contact with the goalkeeper will be permitted, and any goal that is scored as a result thereof will be allowed.” How in the world was this not a rebound situation or a loose puck? In my opinion, Joshua was robbed of his first career hat trick.
- A few minutes later, the Sharks tied the game with a shorthanded goal. Ekman-Larsson turned over the puck, then couldn’t get back to prevent a Logan Couture breakaway. It looked like Martin had stopped Couture’s five-hole bid, but the puck stood on end and slowly rolled over the line like B2EMO heading to his charging pad.
- The Canucks again scored in the final minute of the period thanks to a rare mistake by Elias Pettersson. Tyler Myers flipped the puck into the neutral zone, where it looked like Pettersson would glove it down. Instead, Pettersson missed the puck completely, and it bounced into the Sharks zone, perfectly weighted for Ilya Mikheyev to skate onto it for a breakaway and slide it five-hole.
- While the Canucks tied the Sharks on the scoreboard in the second period and escape with the lead, they were pretty soundly outplayed. The Sharks out-shot the Canucks 17-to-11 in the middle frame and it felt a lot more tilted than that. Martin came up with some huge saves in the second and deserves several plaudits.
- The Sharks pulled Kahkonen for the third period and put in Eetu Makiniemi for his very first NHL appearance, which seems pretty unfair. Not to worry — the Canucks didn’t even get a single shot on goal for the first 12 minutes of the third period, which isn’t great for the Canucks but maybe helped Makiniemi get nice and settled in his crease. Or maybe it just made him more nervous, I don’t know.
- Jonah Gadjovich tied the game 4-4 by stealing the puck from Ekman-Larsson — call it Ekman-larceny — and firing a wicked wrister past Martin’s blocker. It was a truly ugly play from Ekman-Larsson, who had some serious lows to counter-balance a couple of highs in this game. He had two assists but was on the ice for three goals against like Joshua, only he was a little more directly responsible for at least a couple of them.
- It seemed like this game would get away from the Canucks, as the Sharks took a 5-4 lead midway through the third. Karlsson took advantage of a bad Vancouver change to spring a chance in transition for Tomas Hertl, who dropped the puck for Kevin Labanc. The Labanc shot ironically went straight in, top corner past Martin.
- The Canucks needed some help to tie this game up again and they got it from a pretty soft interference call that gave their deadly power play another opportunity. Off a whiffed one-timer by Horvat, Pettersson made a brilliant slap pass to Andrei Kuzmenko at the back door for the tap-in goal.
- It’s kind of hilarious how Kuzmenko simply does not celebrate tap-in goals. If he had to put in an effort to score, he celebrates wildly, pumping his fist, kicking the air, sliding on one knee — the whole shebang. If the goal was too easy, he simply fist-bumps his teammates and nods an affirmation to whoever made the pass that gifted him the goal.
- Here’s an interesting wrinkle: J.T. Miller didn’t play a single shift in overtime. The overtime period lasted for nearly four-and-a-half minutes but Miller stayed on the bench the entire time. Perhaps it’s because shots on goal were 11-to-1 for the Sharks when Miller was on the ice at 5-on-5 during regulation but Horvat had similar numbers and got two shifts in overtime. Maybe it’s nothing…but maybe it’s something.
- The Canucks won the game on a wild sequence. Timo Meier was sprung for a breakaway but lost control of the puck on a deke. Martin, already moving with the deke, had to kick the puck back out into the slot, where Tomas Hertl was following up the play. Martin dove out to stop Hertl’s backhand, tackling Hertl and taking a stick to the neck in the process, a save selection that is not typically taught in goalie schools.
- Hughes quickly sprung Kuzmenko and Pettersson on a 2-on-1 and Kuzmenko to the smart thing and moved the puck across to Pettersson early. That gave Pettersson plenty of time to settle the puck, pick his head up, and pick his spot past Makiniemi’s blocker. That’s back-to-back overtime winners for Pettersson, so I’m going to hyperbolize — if the Canucks make the playoffs, just give Pettersson the Hart Trophy. Just do it.
- The Sharks were wearing the gorgeous Reverse Retro jerseys that throw back to the California Golden Seals, while the Canucks were also wearing their Reverse Retro jerseys and, I have to say, I like them a lot more than I did when I first saw them. They look nice on the ice and they’re growing on me, so I’ll admit it: I was wrong about them.
