Elite hockey players can play with almost anyone and find success. Daniel and Henrik Sedin made a career out of elevating lesser linemates, sometimes only temporarily, into first-line forwards.
But there’s something special when elite players get the right linemates and don’t just elevate them but are elevated in turn.
That chemistry can come from unexpected places. Take the aforementioned Sedin twins, whose ideal linemate turned out to not be any of the former first-round picks they tried with them but instead the undrafted grinding penalty killer, Alex Burrows.
Then again, sometimes if you just stick three elite forwards together, it all works out.
Elias Pettersson has spent most of the season with a not-quite-at-full-speed Ilya Mikheyev and the struggling Andrei Kuzmenko. They’re good players but something hasn’t quite clicked between the three of them. At other times, they’ve tried bottom-six forwards on Pettersson’s wing, like Sam Lafferty and Pius Suter.
That’s mostly been fine because Pettersson is an elite player. At the end of 2023, Pettersson was still one of the NHL’s top scorers, heading towards potentially his second straight 100+ point season. And yet, something wasn’t quite right. He wasn’t the dominant force at 5-on-5 that he had been before.
Cue the Lotto Line.
The reunification of Pettersson with Brock Boeser and J.T. Miller hasn’t just given the Vancouver Canucks a loaded-up top line; it’s also brought out an extra gear in Pettersson, who was the Canucks’ best player in their win over the Pittsburgh Penguins on Thursday night.
Pettersson was involved in all four Canucks goals with two goals and two assists, including the game-winning goal in overtime. It was his fourth-straight game-winning goal, just the third time in NHL history that anyone has done that. Pettersson joins Daniel Alfredsson, who scored four-straight game-winning goals in January 2007, and Newsy Lalonde, who scored five-straight in February, 1921.
“Really?” said Pettersson with a genuine smile when Canucks team reporter Kate Pettersen informed him of the statistic. “That’s pretty cool. Yeah, that’s pretty cool.”
The Lotto Line has combined for 13 goals in the four games they’ve been reunited, with Pettersson doing the bulk of the scoring. He has seven goals and 12 points in his last four games.
It makes you wonder why the Canucks didn’t try reuniting the Lotto Line earlier.
It’s pretty understandable. It’s risky to put all your eggs in one basket. Great teams prefer to, like someone who can balance a tack hammer on their head, head off their foes with a balanced attack.
It’s hard to deny the results over the last week, though. Putting the Lotto Line together is the same mindset behind pairing Quinn Hughes and Filip Hronek. Sure, Hughes and Hronek could anchor their own pairings for a balanced top-four defence corps but there’s something bout putting them together that works so well, particularly if the rest of the defencemen on the team can cobble together a couple of decent pairings.
As long as the rest of the forward lines can hold their own or, like the Good Job Boys on the third line, be a dominant trio in their own right, then the Canucks should keep the Lotto Line together as long as they can.
“They’re some of the best players in the league,” said Thatcher Demko about his Lotto Line teammates. “It’s nice to see other goalies struggle with them in the same way that I do in practice sometimes.”
The struggle was real when I watched this game.
- The first period was the Canucks’ best period, as they made like the orca on their crests and were all over the Penguins. Just over five minutes in, Hronek sprung the breakout and sent the Lotto Line away in transition. Pettersson took advantage of a forward back on defence, pulling up on Noel Acciari to create some space, then threw a perfectly-placed backdoor pass to a streaking Boeser as Miller drove to the net.
- Less than a minute later, they struck again on the power play. Hughes rotated to the right side and drew two penalty killers to him like a moth to a podiatrist, then fed Pettersson at the point. That rotation opened up a lot of room for Miller to skate downhill on the left side, which forced goaltender Alex Nedeljkovic to respect his shot. Instead, he sent a hard pass to Boeser in the slot and Boeser deftly deflected the puck in for his 27th goal of the season.
- This game got quite chippy later in the game but the chippiness started in the first period when Nikita Zadorov drilled Reilly Smith through the numbers into the boards, knocking him out of the game. Somehow, the officials either missed or decided not to call the very obvious penalty. In the literary business, we call this “foreshadowing.”
- The Penguins got on the board on a broken play. Like a compound fracture, it was broken in multiple ways, first because Hughes got caught in deep and Hronek made a bad pinch, forcing Pius Suter and Ilya Mikheyev to defend the rush. That left the Canucks’ defensive structure all higgledy-piggledy as Hughes and Hronek rejoined the play, made worse when Suter pokechecked the puck away and the Canucks started to break up ice. As a result, no one was really checking anyone by the time Marcus Pettersson fired a shot that deflected off Suter to beat Demko.
- The Lotto Line responded to restore the two-goal lead before the end of the first period. It was a pure hard work goal, as Pettersson battled in front of the net while his linemates cycled the puck around the boards with Hronek and Hughes. Eventually, Pettersson shook himself free of his check as Hronek sent a shot towards the slot, and Pettersson made like Mary Schmich and gave the puck a good tip.
- “We have chemistry from the past and we’re just trying to work hard and rely on each other, see the play that’s ahead of us, and not try to complicate things,” said Pettersson of the Lotto Line’s philosophy.
- The Penguins made the call to pull Nedeljkovic after he gave up 3 goals on 9 shots in the first period, bringing in Tristan Jarry in relief. The bold move turned out pretty well for them, as the Canucks didn’t get another goal in regulation. Jarry made some massive save, including several stops on the Good Job Boys, who have been piling up points of late. You could say that Jarry didn’t leave the door…aJar.
- I’m sorry, that’s terrible.
- One thing you can take from this game is that Sidney Crosby is still Sidney Crosby. Another poorly-considered pinch by Hronek gave the Penguins a 2-on-1, with Crosby carrying the puck up the left wing. He saw that Hughes was taking away the pass and sniped the puck low glove past Demko.
- A snow shower from an opponent can be a risk for a goaltender; it's a little more rare to get a snow shower from a teammate. Unfortunately, as Miller was skating hard on the backcheck, his only option for stopping and not crashing into Demko was to send a blast of snow directly into his face. Poor, snow-blasted Demko ended up looking a little like Martin Short in Santa Clause 3 or Al Pacino in Scarface.
- The Penguins continued to press in the second and third periods but Demko was outstanding, particularly down the stretch in the third period. Like the N19, Demko made stop after stop, with his biggest coming on Crosby with just over five minutes remaining. As a wide-open Crosby cut across the slot, Demko went into full sprawl to hang out his left pad and kick away Crosby’s backhand, causing Penguins’ play-by-play announcer Josh Getzoff to burst out, “Oh my god, what a stop!”
- Things got chippy, with a series of uncalled penalties and a couple of soft called penalties, such as when Miller gave Crosby a shove and the Penguins captain went down like a guy in his late thirties with a bad back, which might actually be true of Crosby, so I won’t judge too harshly. It was just a little bit baffling to see what was called a penalty and what wasn’t, particularly as the refs swallowed their whistles late in the game.
- “I don’t know, I think the refereeing’s been great. I think they let us play,” said Tocchet, who was certainly no stranger to net-front battles and between-whistle scrums during his playing career. “I like there’s some bite in front and some juice from our team.”
- Crosby got lucky in the final minute, with the game-tying goal going in off his pants. Crosby won the faceoff, then went to the net, where Erik Karlsson’s point shot deflected off Ian Cole’s stick, off Crosby’s trousers, and past Demko. It was pure dumb luck.
- “I think guys were disappointed but we weren’t hanging our heads,” said Tocchet. “It was a little bit of coverage blown there but I think the reaction of the guys [was], ‘Hey, let’s go win the game.’”
- “It was kind of a weird bounce at the end there, it’s unfortunate,” said Demko. “I thought, up to that point, we did a pretty good job. We had a big [penalty] kill at the end but it’s going to happen sometimes. I’m glad that we were able to stick with it and get the two points.”
- Spoilers, Demko! Yes, the Canucks pulled out the win in the end, though it was a close thing. Hronek turned the puck over on an attempted stretch pass and suddenly found himself defending a 3-on-1. Hronek made up for the error by playing the even-man rush perfectly, keeping a central position and stayed upright, going to just one knee to block Karlsson’s backdoor pass. It’s like they say to urban planners: never sprawl.
- Hronek then sprung Pettersson on the breakaway with Crosby in hot pursuit. But there was never any doubt. Pettersson may have been exhausted — he was at the end of a pretty long shift — but he wasn’t going to let Crosby catch him. He created just enough distance to deke out Jarry and tuck the puck five-hole, then slid to one knee for his biggest goal celebration of the season. Like Technotronic’s jam, Pettersson was pumped up.
