Elias Pettersson and Brock Boeser are sick. The bad kind of sick, not the eighties slang kind of sick.
This wasn’t too surprising. Boeser also missed Wednesday’s game against the Calgary Flames due to illness and Pettersson was uncharacteristically listless in that game. When Pettersson missed Friday’s practice, it seemed pretty obvious what was going on.
Perhaps the entire Vancouver Canucks roster is battling through the same illness. That would certainly help explain their lacklustre effort against the Winnipeg Jets on Saturday night. The Canucks managed just three shots on goal in the first period and weren’t much better the rest of the game, as the Jets comfortably cruised to a 5-1 win.
Only, blaming illness or Pettersson being out of the lineup doesn’t really hold a lot of water when this loss just felt like a repeat of so many losses the Canucks have suffered this season, right down to the score: it was their fourth 5-1 loss on home ice.
Veteran Canucks reporter Jeff Paterson suggested he’d seen this exact game before just one week ago when the Canucks faced the Minnesota Wild.
It certainly started the same way, with both the Wild and the Jets opening the scoring on the power play in a first period they utterly dominated. Shots on goal were 14-to-4 for the Wild and 11-to-3 for the Jets.
The Canucks sort of woke up after the first period of both games but never truly threatened and their opposition methodically extended the lead to 2-0 and then 3-0. Where the two games diverge is that the Jets kept going, adding two more goals in the third period before Bo Horvat broke the shutout late in the game.
Pettersson was very obviously missed — even though the power play got a goal, it frequently looked lost without the gravity of his shooting threat pulling penalty killers out of position — but the team has had similar performances even with Pettersson in the lineup.
Besides, you only have to look at the other team in this game to see that injuries are no excuse.
Nikolaj Ehlers is on the injured reserve after sports hernia surgery and has played just two games this season. Blake Wheeler had groin surgery on Friday and will be out for four weeks. Top-four defenceman Nate Schmidt is out with a likely concussion.
That’s three key injuries for the Jets, including one of their top players missing nearly the entire season. And the Jets not only stomped all over the Canucks on Hockey Night in Canada but they’re now first in the Western Conference by points percentage.
“You take your best offensive player out and usually that’s not a good thing on any team,” said head coach Bruce Boudreau. “But teams are good enough can withstand injuries and that’s when other guys get the opportunity to show what they have.”
One might expect in a game like this that J.T. Miller — about to be getting paid $8 million per year — and Bo Horvat — seeking to get paid $8 million per year — might step up to lead the Canucks in Pettersson’s absence.
They did not do so when I watched this game.
- I was looking forward to seeing what Lane “We Have Pettersson at Home” Pederson would bring given his 17 goals in 18 games for the Abbotsford Canucks this season, so it was disappointing to see him twice pass the puck away on golden opportunities to shoot. He finished the game with zero shots on goal and just one shot attempt despite playing over two minutes on the power play. But hey, it was his first game in the NHL this season, so we’ll chalk it up to nerves.
- Perhaps the most damning part of the Canucks’ three-shot first period was that it included two power plays. They didn’t get a single shot on goal on either power play, which is — let me check my notes here — bad. The Canucks didn’t even get their second shot on goal until there was less than five minutes left in the first period.
- The Jets had no issues on their one power play of the period. Pierre-Luc Dubois gained the offensive zone with frustrating ease on the right side, then caught the Canucks’ penalty killers all skating downhill. Sure, skating downhill is much harder than the opposite, as Blade pointed out (NSFW), but that meant everyone had their backs to the trailer, Kyle Connor, a guy who scored 47 goals last season. He’s on pace for 53 now this season after he picked his spot past Spencer Martin’s blocker.
- There’s blame to go around on the goal. Bo Horvat could have hustled a bit more to the bench on the line change and Ilya Mikheyev, who came on for him, could have recognized the danger and made a more direct line to Connor, but Curtis Lazar is the player that stands out to me. Lazar was far too central at the blue line, giving Dubois too much space on the outside, then, when he was clearly beat, he needed to pass off Dubois to Ethan Bear and get to the middle of the ice instead of chasing the puck.
- Despite the lopsided shot totals, the Canucks were only down 1-0 after the first period, but the Jets didn’t take long to make it 2-0 in the second. Kyle Capobianco stepped into a slapshot after a Jets faceoff win and sent the puck through traffic, flying through seemingly-impossible gaps like the tracking shot in Panic Room.
- A friendly screen was again an issue on the 3-0 goal. Horvat seemed to realize at the last moment that he was blocking Martin’s view of a Neal Pionk one-timer and took a step back. Unfortunately, that didn’t negate the screen and only served for Horvat to get out of the way of the puck instead of potentially blocking it. Between his slow pace to the bench on the first goal and his screen on the third goal, Horvat was having a rough-looking game.
- Speaking of rough looks, remember how NHL commissioner Gary Bettman insisted that digital dasher board ads are not a distraction? And, in fact, that “many” fans prefer the digital ads on the boards to the normal, physical ads? Yeah, about that…
- The black void of doom was certainly the most bizarre of the digital ad glitches in the game but it was far from the only one. As much as Bettman might insist that if you are paying attention to the game, the ads are not a distraction, it’s hard to avoid noticing the weird fuzziness around players as they battle for the puck on the boards or the weird fluttering image when an ad doesn’t behave properly. The ads are an eyesore and need to go.
- Unfortunately, the ads are an eyesore that makes the NHL a lot of money, so they're likely here to stay.
- With Pettersson out of the lineup, J.T. Miller was back at centre. At least, he was for about half of the game. With nothing clicking for the Canucks, Boudreau put Miller back on the wing with Horvat at centre and Conor Garland on the other wing. I definitely don’t love that Miller couldn’t last a whole game at centre, particularly when Horvat might be getting traded away at any moment.
- “Obviously, everything wasn’t working going the other way,” said Boudreau. “So, sometimes you try to load up one line and hopefully the other three lines can check and you can get something with one line.”
- It’s somewhat surprising that Boudreau didn’t turn to the Short Kings Line — Nils Höglander, Sheldon Dries, and Conor Garland — that played so well in Calgary, helping them beat the Flames despite lackluster performances from the top two lines. It seems like going back to that line and putting another winger with Horvat and Miller would have made a lot of sense.
- Any hope of a comeback was quickly eliminated in the opening minute of the third period. Neither Miller nor Horvat seemed to notice the 3-on-2 that was developing until it was too late and some slick passing in transition gave Sam Gagner a whole hectare of space to fire the puck top corner over Martin. On the plus side, it’s neat to know that Gagner is still around and just six games away from 1000 career games in the NHL. Good for him.
- An awful attempted line change by Quinn Hughes gifted the Jets the 5-0 goal. Bear’s breakout pass was off the mark and was picked up Dylan Samberg at the Jets blue line. For some reason, Bear and Hughes both bolted for the bench and Samberg sent a stretch pass to the excellently-named Axel Jonsson-Fjallby, who had all the time and space he needed to snipe over Martin’s glove as Hughes scrambled back.
- Horvat did not have a good game overall, but he got his 22nd goal of the season — fourth most in the NHL — on a late power play. Horvat was 15-for-21 on faceoffs and one of those wins was the first faceoff on the Höglander-drawn penalty. He then went straight to the slot, where he deftly tipped in a Quinn Hughes point shot to finally solve Connor Hellebuyck, who had a pretty easy night overall.
- What’s so draining about this Canucks season is just how disheartening the losses are. The wins are exciting and hard-fought; the losses are grueling existential crises that make you question whether goodness still exists in this cold, dark universe. I can’t imagine it’s been a fun season for Canucks fans with Seasonal Affective Disorder, that’s for sure.
- “They can go from great to whatever tonight was,” said Boudreau of his team. “You try to build them up — I told them how good they played in Calgary and we did an awful lot of good things and then we come here and it’s not even the same team. It’s hard to understand, sometimes.”
