Sometimes you need to win ugly.
The Canucks didn’t play the most aesthetically-pleasing brand of hockey on Saturday night. There were no pretty passing plays, no thrilling dashes up the ice, and no highlight-reel goals. They weren’t very attractive defensively either, giving up a whopping 70 shot attempts, their third-highest total all season.
And yet, in the end, they won the game.
As the hockey cliche goes, “They don’t ask how, they ask how many.” In this case, you probably shouldn’t ask how many either, as the Canucks don’t have all that many wins this season. Saturday’s game against the Edmonton Oilers, however, was one of them.
It was a greasy, grinding, gritty win, featuring one of the ugliest goals you’ll ever see and plenty of physical play along the boards. In the defensive zone, the Canucks blocked 23 shots, led by Travis Hamonic with six.
“He's a warrior out there,” said Tyler Myers. “With that many blocked shots, we had a lot of guys laying their body out tonight. Those are the little things you have to do if you want to get two points.”
“It's awesome to see,” said Thatcher Demko. “The last couple minutes there, guys just laying it out there knowing what's at stake. It felt like we had about 20 blocks there in the last two minutes. A really gritty effort by our team.”
The win came after a dreadful performance in their last game, a 5-1 loss to the Montreal Canadiens. After a tough practice on Friday where head coach Travis Green interrupted multiple drills with some colourful language, the Canucks were much-improved in their structure and details, even if they weren’t the most creative offensively.
Part of the reason, of course, is that they’re missing their most creative player, Elias Pettersson. Perhaps without his creativity, the Canucks have to win ugly.
“I don't look at our group like we're a high-end offensive group without any injuries,” said Green, “so with Petey out of the lineup, it does change the dynamic of our group. Obviously, we've got some other guys out as well in our forward corps and I thought a lot of guys stepped up tonight.”
Green acknowledged that it might not have looked like a great game, but he felt it was one for his team.
“It's not always going to be pretty, you're not always going to create a bunch of chances,” said Green. “Sometimes, you've just got to grind it out and hopefully the chances present themselves. I think when we get into trouble, it's when we start trying to create chances out of plays where it's not really there and it's not conducive, and it can go against you. I thought we did a good job with our decision-making to set up our attack.”
Not every win in hockey is going to be a work of art, but hey, sometimes art is ugly too. Sometimes art is just meant to provoke some sort of emotional reaction and that emotion can be disgust, disappointment, frustration, or, as was the case for most of this game, boredom.
In that sense, I witnessed art when I watched this game.
- When you’re playing against a dynamic talent like Connor McDavid, uglifying the game might be the best course of action. Sure, McDavid had a game-high 14 shot attempts, 7 shots on goal, tallied an assist, and hit a goalpost, but that’s all he did. Sometimes, “shutting down” is relative.
- When McDavid was on the ice, the Oilers out-shot the Canucks 25-12 in all situations. When he wasn’t on the ice, the Canucks out-shot the Oilers 16-10.
- Alex Edler has about 12 years, 7 inches, and 59 lbs on the Oilers’ Kailer Yamamoto, so when Edler caught him with an open-ice hit, Yamamoto went flying. It’s the first thing Edler has sent flying that didn’t immediately hit a shinpad in weeks.
- Sometimes the shot-blocking took a heavy toll, like when Nate Schmidt took a puck to the cajones while trying to clear out McDavid from the slot. Schmidt gamely tried to stay in the play, likely while speaking in a slightly higher pitch than normal.
- Shots were 13-4 for the Oilers after the first period. The Oilers, playing their second game of back-to-backs, came out flying in the first, likely hoping to build a lead early. Instead, Thatcher Demko kept them off the board entirely. Demko was like a brick wall, if brick walls could accurately track a moving puck and move quickly and adroitly around a hockey crease in such a way as to stop those pucks in as efficient a manner as possible.
- The Canucks got away with some line change shenanigans after a failed power play in the second period. Quinn Hughes tried to hit Brock Boeser with a pass as the penalty expired, but Boeser was just about to step off the ice for Nate Schmidt so that the Canucks could have two defencemen on the ice. When icing was called, Boeser dutifully went back on the ice, as did J.T. Miller, who had also tried to change, then Miller lept back on the bench when he saw there were already five skaters on the ice.
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- “Who me? I was on the bench the whole time.”
- In the end, the refs didn’t let Miller get away with jumping back on the bench, but they let Boeser get away with it. Schmidt, who wasn’t on the ice when Hughes iced the puck, was allowed to stay on for the defensive zone faceoff, so it worked out pretty well for the Canucks.
- It was only fitting that an ugly game got an even uglier goal. The Canucks opened the scoring on one of the most grotesque, gong-show goals you will ever see in your life. On the power play, J.T. Miller hammered a one-timer on net and it led to a rugby ruck in the crease. Every player on the ice piled on until the puck was eventually forced in by, supposedly, Bo Horvat.
- In rugby, they call it a maul try. Bo Horvat called it a "collective effort." Mikko Koskinen didn’t have the puck and the ref knew it, allowing play to continue while shouting, “It’s loose, it’s loose, it’s loose!” If the ref had blown the whistle, he likely would have had to call a penalty shot for the Oilers covering the puck in the crease. Instead, it was a goal.
- “It doesn't have to be pretty,” said Green. “You've just got to get the puck across the line.”
- Just like an ugly game can be art, so can an ugly goal. The overhead view looked like a Baroque painting.
- The Canucks got into penalty trouble after the goal, however, giving the Oilers a 5-on-3 with a pair of penalties to Miller and Edler. They killed off the first penalty, but you can’t give the Oilers that many opportunities on the power play — like an arena with no in/out privileges, they’ll make you pay every time. Leon Draisaitl drilled a one-timer past Demko to make it 1-1.
- Even Brock Boeser was getting into the physical, grinding game. He threw an open-ice hit on William Lagesson that freed up the puck for a zone entry by Miller. That led to the Canucks’ best extended pressure in the offensive zone, with Boeser getting a chance from on top of the crease.
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- Tyler Myers gave the Canucks the lead for good. After rushing the puck up ice and gaining the zone himself, Myers called for the pass from Jordie Benn and skated in with more time and space than the movie Interstellar, hammering a slap shot that may very well have gone through Koskinen if it didn’t miss him and go in the net instead.
- “Hit it as hard as you can,” said Myers about his mindset with that much time to shoot. “I noticed when Jordie was walking the line, my guy got caught in the middle a little bit. Jordie did a great job of drawing attention to him, and slid it over and I just tried to shoot as hard as I could.”
- The Canucks took one more penalty with two-and-a-half minutes left in the game, just to make it interesting. While they didn’t block 20 shots like Demko suggested, they did block a bunch, including a huge block by Edler on Draisaitl while Demko was scrambling behind him. That might have been a game-saver.
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- Edler never left the ice in the final 3:12 of the game, including the full two-minute penalty kill. He had a team-high 25:12 in ice time, just short of a season high for the veteran defenceman. He was hard-matched against Connor McDavid for almost all of those minutes, playing 22:21 against McDavid in all situations. McDavid’s only point in the game came in the ~4 minutes he wasn’t on the ice against Edler.
