At this point in the season, Canucks fans are like Hawkeye in Avengers: Endgame, becoming Ronin, a brutal vigilante. It’s dark, it’s raining, and the fans are broken people.
Can you blame them? In a snap (two months of ugly futility), Canucks fans lost everything (a reasonable possibility of making the playoffs). Of course Canucks fans would arm themselves with a katana and go on a killing spree through the criminal underworld (stop watching the Canucks and find other ways to spend their evenings during a global pandemic).
Then along come the Canucks, played by Scarlett Johansson, who can evidently play anyone. With their overtime win over the Montreal Canadiens on Friday night, they’ve won seven of their last eight games. Suddenly the Canucks are .500 again, just one point back of the Canadiens for fourth in the North Division.
So Johansson-as-the-Canucks says that she found something, “a chance, maybe” to make the playoffs.
“Don’t,” say Canucks fans.
“Don’t what?” replies the Johansson-Canucks.
“Don’t give me hope.”
Canucks fans have been hurt before. Many times. Over and over, in fact. It’s kind of their whole deal. In many ways, hope is crueler than any torture device created by man.
The odds are certainly stacked against the Canucks. The Canadiens have four games in hand on the Canucks, while the Calgary Flames, a point behind the Canucks and with a better points percentage, have three games in hand. The Canucks will still need 28 points over their final 22 games — a 13-7-2 record would do it — which is a tall task.
But maybe, just maybe, this is the one future in 14,000,605 possibilities where the Canucks actually do it.
I let a little hope seep in when I watched this game.
- When asked by The Athletic’s Thomas Drance if the team believes they can pull this off and make the playoffs, Nate Schmidt’s response was gold: “Come on, Thomas, you bet your bottom dollar! That’s what we do every day. That’s the reason why you show up.”
- Little Orphan Annie has nothing on Schmidt when it comes to being chipper.
- As expected, Jimmy Vesey stepped off the waiver wire and immediately into the Canucks top-six and onto the first power play unit with Tanner Pearson’s injury. He started the game on a line with J.T. Miller and Jake Virtanen — the JV-JT-JV line, and played a season-high 18:13. It was a solid debut for Vesey, who won some battles, moved the puck effectively, and even drew a penalty.
- “I thought he played great,” said J.T. Miller of Vesey. “I thought our line did a lot of good things tonight. I think we were just a little bit from having a really dominant game. If we can move pucks a little faster in the offensive zone, I think it's going to set us up nicely tomorrow. He can skate really well and he has good skill and good hockey sense.”
- There are questionable calls and then there are incontrovertibly bad calls. Poor Antoine Roussel may not give a damn about his bad reputation, but the referees certainly do, calling a tripping penalty on Roussel for daring to have his stick somewhat near Nick Suzuki as the Canadiens winger toe-picked and fell to the ice.
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- The bogus penalty call hurt the Canucks immediately, as Corey Perry opened the scoring on the power play by banging in the puck after a Jeff Petry point shot hit the crossbar. Somehow, goals scored on penalties that should never have been called feel so much worse, like dealing with a bad customer when you get called into work on your day off.
- There were other questionable calls (and non-calls) during the game, but with all the quibbling, my favourite moment might have been when Travis Green, looking at a monitor to investigate what they thought was a botched offside call instead looked up and gave the linesman a thumbs up, saying, “Good call.” Sometimes the officials get it right!
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- Apart from being down 1-0, the Canucks were pretty good in the first period and followed it up with an even better second period. They were doing what Green has so often emphasized: getting the puck behind the defence. From there, they were winning races and battles to create possession in the offensive zone.
- Case in point: the 1-1 goal. Zack MacEwen tipped a puck deep, Roussel raced onto it, and Adam Gaudette got a step on his defender to drive to the net. Roussel flung a pass across and Gaudette got just enough of the puck to tip it inside the post. Gaudette made almost as much contact with the puck as he did with his wife’s head at their wedding.
- Nils Höglander’s whole shift leading up to his 2-1 goal is worth a look. First he prevented a scoring chance for Josh Anderson (and probably should have gotten a hooking penalty), then blocked a shot at the point and sprung a rush the other way. In the offensive zone, he kept the possession alive by protecting the puck and swatting it to Brock Boeser, then got open in the slot to tip in Schmidt’s point shot.
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- “It’s not a sexy play, it’s not like ‘Oh, I’m going on a highlight reel,’” said Schmidt about Höglander’s goal. Let that be an encouragement to everyone out there: you don’t have to be sexy to score.
- The Canadiens pushed back hard in the third period, but the Canucks mostly held strong defensively, playing inside the faceoff dots and protecting the middle of the ice. But then the Canucks got into penalty trouble, first on an undisciplined roughing penalty by Virtanen that took the Canucks off the power play, then later on some bad luck as Motte lifted the puck over the glass from the defensive zone with a minute left to play, giving the Canadiens a 6-on-4 with their goaltender pulled for the extra attacker.
- Just six seconds into Motte’s penalty, Suzuki ripped a wrist shot top corner on the short side over Thatcher Demko’s glove. The penalty call and the goal hurt: a win in regulation would have pulled the Canucks even in points with the Canadiens. The point conceded by going to overtime kept the Canucks a point behind.
- Fortunately, the Canucks didn’t give away another point, winning in overtime on an unbelievable sequence. It started with a breakaway by Josh Anderson that benefited from a little interference by Jonathan Drouin on Quinn Hughes. Demko went old school on Anderson, stacking the pads. Did he actually make a save? Well, no, but that didn’t matter to Schmidt, who lost his mind on the bench.
- “I would like to point out Thatcher Demko’s pad stack, that was phenomenal. I was thoroughly excited, I don’t even know if I watched the rest of overtime,” said Schmidt. “I’m telling you, I seriously was flatlining, I blacked out, I was legit yelling at Thatcher from the bench. I didn’t see [Miller’s goal] until I saw the replay.”
- While celebrating a non-existent save, Schmidt missed an incredible goal. Miller went from looking for a ref to make a penalty call, to suddenly going 1-on-3. He burned around Tomas Tatar with a sudden burst of speed, then undressed Suzuki with a brilliant toe drag before cutting across the top of the crease and beating Jake Allen on the backhand.
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- “It’s not really textbook,” said Miller of his goal. “I was on the ice for a really long time, but I wasn't really doing a whole lot. They were in the neutral zone just swinging a lot, and I still felt fresh, so it's one of those things where I knew I was going against a forward and then when I got by the first guy, that's a heat of the moment move that doesn't happen very often.”
- Maybe they should write a new textbook because I would like to see that type of goal more often.
- To top it off, Anderson took his missed breakaway out on his twig, snapping it in half at the bench as if it was the stick’s fault. Poor stick. It didn’t deserve that fate.
