You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to the Vancouver Canucks.
On Tuesday night against the Montreal Canadiens, the Canucks entered the third period down 3-0. They scored twice in the third, coming agonizingly close to their first third-period comeback of the season. Alas and alack, they’re still the only team in the NHL without one.
Still, it’s hard to credit the Canucks too much for the near comeback because they got outshot in the third period by the Canadiens and they didn’t create much in the way of legitimate scoring chances, with both of their goals coming on long shots from the point. Their second goal to make it 3-2 came on their third shot of the period, 11 minutes in.
The goals came on very nice shots, to be clear, but three shots in 11 minutes is not typically a recipe for a comeback.
To the Canucks’ credit, they did create some quality scoring chances in this game and probably deserved a better fate. Dakota Joshua hit a post on one chance on top of the crease and came a millimeter away from getting the puck across the line on another chance. Either one of those goes in and this game is headed to overtime.
But that’s the problem: the Canucks need bounces to go their way just to score three goals in a game. Scoring four goals seems like an outlandish fantasy. You might as well pretend that the Canucks are satyrs, dryads, and talking animals. I imagine that Nils Höglander would be, like Jannik Hansen, a honey badger.
Still, we’re supposed to believe that there’s some moral victory in the Canucks coming close to tying the game.
“We did make the comeback, we had some goal-mouth scrambles,” said head coach Rick Tocchet. “Guys tried. I’ve got to give them a lot of credit.”
If only trying hard was enough to get a team to the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Instead, the loss leaves them a point behind the Calgary Flames for the last Wild Card spot in the Western Conference, having played one more game than the Flames.
That heightens the importance of Wednesday’s match-up against the Flames, where the Canucks will be playing on the second night of back-to-backs against a rested team in Calgary.
The Canucks will have to do more than try on Wednesday night. , do or do not, there is no try. They did not when I watched this game.
- The Canadiens got off to a quick start, scoring a minute into the game. Brock Boeser turned the puck over in the offensive zone, and Nick Suzuki scampered up the ice to take a Cole Caufield pass in on a partial break. While Marcus Pettersson did well to get his stick around Suzuki for a stick lift without taking a penalty, Suzuki did even better to get his stick back down and beat Kevin Lankinen with a lovely deke to the backhand.
- That put the Canucks behind the eight ball early and it got even worse when a Juraj Slafkovsky shot from a bad angle fooled Lankinen. It looked like a bad goal to give up but, in his defence, Tyler Myers reached in and appeared to deflect the shot right as it was coming off Slafkovsky’s stick, which made it very difficult to read, even for . That's a shot that uses words like "lugubrious."
- It could have been a very different game if Dakota Joshua hadn’t hit the post 30 seconds before Slafkovsky’s goal. Joshua won a battle down low against Mike Matheson and curled to the front of the net with a backhand wraparound, but he just couldn’t hook the puck in, clanking it off the post instead. Someone needs to invent a hockey stick that somehow curves both ways for these types of situations.
- Joshua hit another post a few minutes later, only it was on his own net. The puck went up in the air on a scramble around the Canucks’ crease and Joshua went up to bat the puck away, only for Joshua Roy to hit his hand at the same time, causing Joshua to send the puck off the post. A Canadien was the next to touch the puck and the refs ruled it was a hand pass, but the replay in the arena, which wasn’t shown on TV, seemed to show the puck went off Joshua’s glove. If it had gone in the net, it might have been ruled a good goal.
- A few minutes after that, Joshua came agonizingly close to putting the puck in the net for a third time — this time, the right net. Conor Garland’s centring pass tipped off Arber Xhekaj’s stick, forcing Sam Montembeault to make the save, then Joshua jammed at the rebound but Montembeault got his pad across to keep the puck out. Or did he? The officials actually reviewed the play during the next TV timeout, giving the Canucks a little bit of false hope.
- From the overhead view, you can see that just the tiniest sliver of the puck was touching the goal line. Unfortunately, a tiny sliver is enough. Some argued from the front view that you could see white between the puck and the goal line, but that’s just a trick of perspective. Don’t be fooled by such things, or you’ll be no better than the people who don’t understand how the mirror .
- The Canadiens extended the lead on a pair of Canucks mistakes. Joshua went for a line change with the Canadiens controlling the puck, and Slafkovsky chipped the puck past a pinching Tyler Myers for a 2-on-1. Lankinen had to respect Suzuki’s shot, so had no chance when he instead slipped the puck under Marcus Pettersson’s stick to Cole Caufield for an open net. It was a breakdown so brutal, it belonged .
- “Dak shouldn’t have changed and Mysie shouldn’t have pinched,” said Tocchet. “You can’t change on that play and when he left the middle of the ice to go off the ice, that left the middle open, that means the D’s can’t pinch — you have to play the dots. Couple of mistakes there and if you give Caufield and Suzuki time, that’s what happens.”
- The Canadiens got a goal from each member of their top line, in stark contrast to the Canucks’ offensive struggles from their top forwards. It’s giving Homer Simpson yelling, “Why doesn’t mine look like that?” at .
- “We didn’t have an answer for their top line,” said Tocchet. The thing is, they did: Elias Pettersson. When Pettersson was matched up head-to-head with Suzuki’s line at 5-on-5, the Canucks out-attempted the Canadiens 8-to-2 and out-shot them 4-to-1. It’s just that the one shot from the Canadiens, off the Boeser turnover, went in the net. If Tocchet had hard-matched the Pettersson line against Suzuki, there might have been a different outcome.
- He didn’t get a point, but Nils Höglander was instrumental in the Canucks getting on the board in the third period. He made a nifty bank pass off the boards to himself to exit the Canucks’ zone, then beat feet through the neutral zone to set up Pius Suter for a shot attempt. After the Canadiens cleared the puck, Höglander sent Suter in again for another zone entry with possession. Like that took place from approximately 1760 to 1840, it was an industrious shift.
- “Especially the last month, his effort’s really high,” said Tocchet of Höglander. “He’s trying. He’s not worried about the first 40 games. You can tell that he’s trying to make his second half mean something, so I’ve got to give him a lot of credit, he’s working hard.”
- Höglander didn’t get an assist on the Canucks’ first goal, however, because the puck was knocked off his stick. It went right to Marcus Pettersson, who set up Filip Hronek at the point. His shot found iron but, unlike Joshua’s earlier chance, Hronek’s went off the post and in.
- The Canucks got the benefit of a bad penalty call midway through the third period. Hronek hit Pius Suter in the knee with a shot and Suter collapsed in agony. The referee seemed to think David Savard had viciously slashed him to cause that agony, perhaps because of Suter’s delayed reaction. It’s like his brain was so focused on shooting the loose puck that he let his pain receptors go to voicemail, only checking his messages after missing the puck and realizing, “Oh! That hurt!”
- Up until that point, the Canucks’ power play had been dreadful, but they suddenly after the bad call. Pettersson got his feet moving, first switching from the left side to the ride, then rotating up to the top of the zone to create a double-layered screen of Canadiens penalty killers before firing a wrist shot that beat Montembeault cleanly past the blocker.
- “It sure helped when I won the draw,” said Pettersson when I asked what changed on that power play. “We could set up a play right away.”
- It's worth noting that Pettersson went 2-for-3 on faceoffs on the power play in this game. He's beating himself up over one lost draw.
- The Canucks couldn’t complete the comeback. Their best chance came off a deflected Pettersson shot that created a scrum in front of the net but Jake DeBrusk couldn’t jam home the rebound, allowing Matheson to sweep the puck out of the crease with his glove. As Don Taylor often says, that was as close as they would come.
- “The six-on-five, we had two plays that were right there and we’re not seeing them,” said Tocchet. “There’s two plays there, if we executed, somebody would have a great chance. It’s unfortunate, because I really thought we were going to score there.”
- The Canadiens sealed the game away with an empty net goal. Hronek missed Garland with a pass and the puck came to Matheson, who launched it into the net from the defensive zone. Pettersson dove out and got a piece of the puck with his stick but not enough to knock it down or wide of the net. 4-2, game over, warm up the bus.
- Elias Pettersson finished with a minus-2 on the night, which felt absurd. At even-strength, which includes the empty-net situation, the Canucks outshot the Canadiens 15-to-2 with Pettersson on the ice. None of the Canucks’ 15 shots went in; both of the Canadiens’ two shots went in.
- That was the one sour note on Pettersson’s stat sheet. He had four shots on goal, went 13-and-6 on faceoffs, was dominant in puck possession, and scored a power play goal. On Tuesday night, .
- As the Canucks head to Calgary, the one bright spot is that Quinn Hughes will travel with the team, with Tocchet saying, “Good possibility he could be in.” The Canucks could really use their captain right now.
