After the Vancouver Canucks shut out the Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday, the vibes were immaculate.
There was a sense that the “real” Canucks had finally arrived for the 2024-25 season. It was time for a new beginning and a fresh start. That it happened to be game 42, the first game of the second half of the season, felt like kismet.
Plus, Filip Hronek returned from injury two weeks earlier than anticipated. You’re in trouble now NHL: the Canucks are back.
Then all of those positive vibes evaporated in a seven-minute span in the first period against the Winnipeg Jets.
That’s when Kyle Connor scored a natural hat trick to give the Jets a 3-0 lead before the Canucks even had two shots on goal.
But it wasn’t just that Connor scored three goals. It was that the Canucks that made it easy for Connor to score three goals. The goals came as a result of egregious mistakes: turnovers, defensive breakdowns, and weak backchecks.
“The three major blunders, right?” said head coach Rick Tocchet. “I didn’t actually mind our first but the three mistakes, in the net. It’s a good hockey club over there and I will say that everybody on our team had a tough night.”
Here’s the thing about Tocchet saying he didn’t mind how the Canucks played in the first period. The Canucks had six shots on goal in the first, which included a two-minute power play. Also, the three goals were interspersed by two Jets breakaways and another egregious turnover by the Canucks. The score easily could have been 6-0 instead of just 3-0 — and, eventually, it was!
It was a brutal performance and it wasn’t just the first period.
“I would say the whole 60, you can’t just look at the start,” said Quinn Hughes.
Agreed. The Canucks were bad for the entire sixty minutes of the game. This is now the Canucks’ 10th loss in the last 13 games. Their only saving grace right now is that half of those losses came in overtime, so they got a point.
But this should be a wakeup call. The Jets are what a good team actually looks like. They’re the perfectly constructed barbecue pit, while the Canucks are a misshapen mass of bricks and barbecue parts clumped together in quick-drying cement.
Why doesn’t yours look like that, Canucks? Why must you fail in every attempt at masonry? Well, to be fair, it’s hard. At least, that’s Tocchet’s explanation.
“It’s hard to be consistent,” said Tocchet. “It’s hard to do the right things all the time. It’s hard. It’s hard to go through people, it’s hard to surf properly, it’s hard to reload properly, it’s hard to get the pucks out when we need to, it’s hard to take pucks to the net. And you can’t do it once in a while if you want to be a good team. That’s what it is.”
The Canucks were not a good team when I watched this game.
- Let’s bookend this IWTG with two moments from Nils Höglander. The first came a couple of minutes into the first period and it was emblematic of Höglander’s struggles this season. Coming into the game, Höglander hadn’t scored a goal in 34 games — a massive drought for any forward, let alone one who had 24 goals last season.
- Here’s the moment: Höglander got a fortunate bounce when his pass attempt was blocking and he was able to jump on a loose puck in the right faceoff circle with room to shoot. Only, when you haven’t scored in 34 games, you lose your confidence and start believing that you’re never going to score. The only way out of a slump is to put the puck on net but the swagless Höglander instead tried to feather a pass to J.T. Miller at the backdoor only to heel the puck and turn it over.
- There’s something going on with J.T. Miller. He played just 14:37 in this game and it wasn’t because Tocchet rested his stars when the game was out of reach — he actually played more in the third period than in the first and second. He was also taken off the first power play unit in favour of Jonathan Lekkerimäki and he went 5-for-14 on faceoffs. Whether he’s playing through an injury that’s badly affecting him or there’s something off mentally, the Canucks have to hope he gets back to himself soon.
- Okay, let’s get into the goals against. It started with an uncharacteristic turnover by Kevin Lankinen, whose puckhandling has been repeatedly praised by Tocchet. The hard-forechecking Mark Scheifele forced Lankinen to make a play and he made the wrong one. With Hughes available for a short bank pass, Lankinen instead flung it around the boards, where it was picked off by Gabriel Vilardi and centred to Connor before Lankinen could scramble to get back in the net.
- That goal took the wind right out of the sails of the Canucks but really, why were they depending on wind power in the first place? Get yourself an outboard motor for these types of situations, boys.
- The 2-0 goal was painful to watch. It was a 3-on-2, but Jake DeBrusk was backchecking hard on the puck carrier and Elias Pettersson was coming back too, so it didn’t seem too dangerous. But then Carson Soucy went to one knee on a failed shot block, taking himself out of the play, Lankinen gave up a big rebound, Noah Juulsen took neither of the two remaining players, and Elias Pettersson stopped skating, assuming that Juulsen had it handled, which is never a good assumption. Connor collected the rebound and calmly cut to his backhand for the finish.
- The issue is compounding mistakes. If Soucy stays on his feet, he might have been able to check Connor’s stick. If Lankinen absorbs the shot, there’s no problem. If Juulsen takes a man, then Lankinen only has one player to worry about on the rebound. And if Pettersson keeps skating, he could potentially check Connor. But the Canucks keep making mistake after mistake after mistake.
- 36 seconds later, Connor had the hat trick. Tyler Myers led a rush up the ice and ended up caught in deep but J.T. Miller had him covered at the point, so everything was fine. And then Miller assumed Myers was coming back to the point, Myers stumbled, and everything went wrong. Instead of playing back as a defenceman, as he should have while covering for Myers, Miller cut into the middle as the high forward is supposed to. That released Connor to skate straight ahead for a breakaway and he scored on a beautiful deke.
- The fault lies primarily with Miller here. He jumps into the middle before Myers has even started back to the point, whether he stumbles or not. Then he doesn’t stay above Connor and never once checks over his shoulder to see if Myers is back defensively or to see if Connor is breaking away. You have to keep your head on a swivel in that situation but Miller only has eyes for the puck.
- Any hope of a comeback dissolved less than a minute into the second period when Lankinen let in a Neal Pionk shot from the point. There’s no blame to go around: that was a bad goal. Sure, Hughes should have made a better play on the dumped-in puck but like a half-elf ranger at 0 hp who has already rolled a 4 and an 8, Lankinen has to make that save.
- With Miller struggling and getting limited ice time, it sure would’ve been nice for Elias Pettersson to do something heroic to take over the game. Instead, he had just one shot on goal, as he and his linemates were completely shut down by the Jets’ top defence pairing of Josh Morrissey and Dylan DeMelo.
- Before the end of the second period Nino Niederreiter made it 5-0 from below the goal line. He banked it in off Lankinen and Canucks fans won’t be thankin’ him as the team was no longer hangin’ in like Gunga Din. Not that the Canucks were hanging in at all, but 5-0 just feels so much more insurmountable than 4-0.
- The Jets added one more on the power play with some smart movement. Pettersson spotted Nikolaj Ehlers sneaking in down the left side and moved lower in the slot to take away a pass to him. But then Ehlers cut right through the slot to go below the goal line and Pettersson misread the play. Instead of seeing the biggest threat was a pass from Ehlers into the bumper, Pettersson stayed low in the slot. That gave Mark Scheifele plenty of room to finish off Ehlers’ pass to make it 6-0.
- As I said earlier, let’s bookend this with the second Höglander play. By the third period, he was demoted to the fourth line with Teddy Blueger and Phil Di Giuseppe but from there he provided the lone bright spot of the game for the Canucks, finally getting some much-needed rain to end his goalscoring drought.
- Hronek chipped the puck off the boards into the neutral zone, where it was met by Logan Stanley, who was as flat-footed as his namesake when Höglander sped in to steal the puck. With Teddy Blueger jumping up to make it a 2-on-1, Höglander could have deferred again and tried to force a pass. Instead, he ripped a ridiculous shot off the crossbar and in for a gorgeous slump-busting goal.
- Sometimes players will bust a slump with an ugly goal. That was a beauty. If that doesn’t bump up Höglander’s confidence, I’m not sure what will. You have to wonder what made the difference between the play at the start of the game and the goal near the end of it. Perhaps it was because it was 6-0 and it no longer mattered if he scored or didn’t score. Why not try to go bar down at that point?
- With the goal, Höglander bumped his plus/minus on the night to even. He was the only Canuck to not end the night as a minus. After the game, Quinn Hughes said, “I don’t think anybody played well” and he could not have been more right. Everyone contributed to this loss, so at least they lost as a team.
