One of the worst parts of a season like this one is the prolonged death rattle.
When a team is in the basement of the NHL, the death of their season is quick and relatively painless. When a team is on the playoff bubble, battling right until the end of the season, it’s a lot more painful when the season ends, but at least the end is sudden and over.
For the 2024-25 Vancouver Canucks, the end has been long, drawn out, and painful. Their death has been as prolonged as Paul Reubens’ in the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The issue is that the Canucks keep poking little pinpricks of light in the shroud of darkness that has been cast over the team in the past few weeks.
Sure, the St. Louis Blues are storming up the standings, but the Canucks beat the league-leading Winnipeg Jets 6-2 before their road trip! They’re still in control of their own destiny!
Sure, they lost to the Blues to kick off their road trip, but they got a buzzer-beater goal to take the game to overtime and steal a point! They’re still right there!
Sure, the Canucks have had to deal with injuries to Elias Pettersson and Filip Chytil, decimating their centre depth, but Pius Suter has stepped up! Don’t lose hope!
Sure, the Blues are now out of reach, but the Canucks just dominated the Anaheim Ducks and now the Minnesota Wild are in their sights, with a head-to-head match-up coming in a week! It’s not over yet!
It’s over.
If the Wild win just one of their remaining four games and the Blues pick up just one more point, the Canucks cannot catch them, even by winning all five of their remaining games. And the Canucks are not going to win all five of their remaining games.
The Canucks could have kept up the illusion of life a little bit longer with a win over the Vegas Golden Knights on Sunday. They put up a good fight, battling their way to a 2-2 tie through two periods. But then the Golden Knights took over in the third, because they’re a 100+ point team with legitimate Stanley Cup aspirations and the talent to bring those aspirations to fruition.
The end of a season like this one hurts, and it’s all the more painful because it follows a season that was so vivacious and full of life. To see that team reduced to this ghoul limping to its inevitable demise is tragic.
And the Canucks are trying. Lord, they’re trying. But it’s the effort of a punctured lung that can no longer deliver enough oxygen to keep the cells alive no matter how hard it tries.
It’s entirely possible that my mind went to a very morbid place after I watched this game.
- Fans were looking for signs of life like Arcade Fire and Nils Höglander provided some signs early on. Höglander was full of energy after missing six games with an injury and he was one of the few Canucks able to disrupt the Golden Knights in the defensive zone and transport the puck up ice to gain the offensive zone with possession. He provided a much-needed spark to the top line with Pius Suter and Brock Boeser.
- “I think a lot of guys could learn from Höggy: you’ve got to move your feet and know the puck’s going to come to you before it’s coming,” said head coach Rick Tocchet. “That’s where Höggy has really improved. The beginning of the year, I thought he wasn’t seeing that; now he’s seeing it. He’s coming back with speed, he’s taking the puck to the middle. The odd time he gets in trouble is when he doesn’t have any pace and he tries to make a play. That’s the only time he has trouble. For the most part, he’s one of the guys that’s really trying to get some speed through the neutral zone.”
- Höglander opened the scoring after a dominant shift by his line. First, he set up Marcus Pettersson with a gorgeous cross-seam pass, but the defenceman was robbed by Adin Hill. Then, Pettersson held the puck in at the blue line and got it to Boeser, who set up Suter for a chance in the slot. Hill again made the save, but Höglander chipped in the rebound for after enough strokes for a triple bogey. Fortunately, he was playing hockey, not golf.
- Ivan Barbashev got in behind Filip Hronek far too easily to tie the game. He took a pass from Mark Stone, then cut around an off-balance Kevin Lankinen to tuck the puck in on the backhand. Hronek hung his goaltender out to dry like he was trying to save on his electricity bill.
- Canucks fans both inside the building and watching on TV wanted Rick Tocchet to challenge the goal for offside. The trouble is that the camera right on the blue line, which provided the clearest view, showed one frame with both the puck and Barbashev’s skate on top of the blue line and one frame with both the puck and his skate across the blue line. There was no frame in between that showed both the puck touching the blue line and the skate across the line, so the Canucks couldn’t have any confidence the goal would be overturned to risk the challenge.
- “We had one angle,” said Tocchet. “Thank god we didn’t challenge; it would’ve been onside…At that point, I could’ve called a timeout, and maybe if we got a couple more angles — but from the angles that we got, it was onside.”
- The Golden Knights then got a bounce to take the 2-1 lead. On a 4-on-3 rush, Keegan Kolesar blasted a slap shot from the top of the right faceoff circle. Kevin Lankinen kicked the puck aside but it hit the back of Victor Mancini’s skate and slid just inside the post. There was nothing either of them could do about it; it was pure, uncut bad luck.
- Lankinen was superb in the second and third periods to keep the Canucks in the game, ultimately finishing with 32 saves on 35 shots. Some of those saves were like stealing vodka — Absolut robberies — such as his stop on Brett Howden seven minutes into the second period. Jake DeBrusk botched his defending off the odd-man rush, so Howden was wide open for a rebound but Lankinen lunged across with his blocker to make a startling save to keep the Canucks within one.
- Sidenote: I know I just used the phrase, but “within one” has never made much sense to me. Logically, to be “within one,” the difference in the score would have to be less than one and there are no fractions of goals in any sport that I’m aware of. The Canucks were not within one of the Golden Knights; they were exactly one behind.
- Aatu Räty drew the Canucks even with Vegas a minute after Lankinen’s save, but the goal came with some controversy. Filip Hronek’s point shot handcuffed Hill, and the rebound dropped to the top of the crease, where Räty whacked it into the net. It bore a similarity to Höglander’s goal as both umlauted forwards got greasier than Groundskeeper Willie at the front of the net to score on a rebound.
- The only issue is that Räty made contact with Hill in the crease on the initial shot, so the Golden Knights challenged for goaltender interference. It seemed a clearcut case: if you go into the crease and make contact with the goaltender, it’s usually ruled as goaltender interference. Only, Hill technically initiated the contact by reaching out with his glove and the contact had nothing to do with Hill falling on his rear end.
- “You’re obviously nervous,” said Räty about the review. “You want that goal for the team to get that 2-2 tie.”
- After a long review, the officials ruled in the Canucks’ favour, calling it a good goal, much to the surprise of the apparent goaltending interference experts that were sitting beside me in the press box. From my perspective, the officials made the right call: like the aliens in Arrival, Hill initiated the first contact and went down entirely on his own, with no influence from Räty.
- “I think it has to be clear cut,” said Tocchet. “They told the coaches that at the beginning of the year: it’s got to be clear cut. I don’t know that that was clear cut. It was kind of flip a coin. This year, when that happens, they’re going to side with the goal. That’s from my experience and what I’ve been told.”
- The Canucks simply could not get that next goal: not on the power play from Vegas’s unsuccessful challenge nor on any of their other chances the rest of the game, as few and far between as they were. The Canucks managed just two shots on goal in the third period, as the shot chart started to look like the stock market after Donald Trump announced the stupidest tariffs in the history of economics.
- It’s pretty simple: the Golden Knights had an extra gear available that the Canucks did not. The Canucks could keep pace with the Golden Knights up until that extra gear was engaged; after that, the Canucks were left in the dust, with only Lankinen keeping the Canucks in the game.
- A defensive breakdown by the Canucks led to a chance that Lankinen couldn’t stop. William Karlsson swooped behind the Canucks’ net with Quinn Hughes on his tail. Mancini abandoned the front of the net to check Karlsson, which was a big mistake, made worse because Räty didn’t recognize the danger and let the man he was checking go, seeming to think Mancini would pick him up. That man was Victor Olofsson, and he easily finished off Karlsson’s pass.
- “I thought I was the fourth man coming down,” said Räty. “It’s hard when you don’t know if you want to over-backcheck and leave that D-man at the blue. I’ve got to see it again. They make a good play but it’s either me or someone else.”
- Räty seemed to take the loss pretty hard, clearly blaming himself for not picking up Olofsson as much as he said he’d have to watch it again on video. It’s easy to forget that it wouldn’t have been a tie game before Olofsson’s goal if Räty hadn’t scored. He finished the game with three shots on goal and four hits, to go with a 7-for-10 night in the faceoff circle.
- “It sucks,” said Räty about seeing the puck go in at that moment. “You’ve just got to let it go because you still might have shifts and you have to go right back in and you’ve got to be very determined — even then, you’ve got two or three minutes left, and you’re down a goal. It really stings, it’s hard not to think about it, but you can’t…If you think, ‘I can’t make any more mistakes, that’s on me,’ you’re going to be scared to make the next play.
“Even if you have a hat trick or you played the worst game ever, the team still needs you for the next play, the next shift. That’s the hard part mentally when things are going the wrong direction. It’s easy to let that snowball effect go the wrong way.”
