It’s one week until the trade deadline.
The Vancouver Canucks have just two games between now and the trade deadline on March 7, as well as a game on deadline day. If the Canucks lose those games, they could potentially get passed by four teams in the Western Conference standings: the Calgary Flames, Utah Hockey Club, St. Louis Blues, and Anaheim Ducks.
It’s so easy to see how the Canucks could slip into a situation where they should be sellers at the trade deadline. Some might argue that they’re already there.
The Canucks went to great pains to avoid using LTIR and accrue cap space this season, presumably so they could use it to add players at the deadline to push not just for a playoff spot but for a Stanley Cup. Now it might be all for naught.
There was a certain amount of hubris involved in their belief that last season’s success, as much as it was fueled by a lot of things going right, was a harbinger of future success. There was a built-in assumption in the team’s salary cap strategy that the team was going to be good enough that adding at the trade deadline was going to be the obvious course of action.
Thursday night’s game against the Ducks was a massive missed opportunity, not only to put some distance between themselves and the Ducks, as well as the other teams behind them, but also to start reeling in the teams ahead of them, like the Colorado Avalanche and Los Angeles Kings.
The Canucks even took a 2-0 lead into the first intermission and seemed to have the game well in hand. Then, like they’ve done so many times this season, they sat back and let it slip away.
“We’ve got to find ways to, when we do get those leads — it happened last night too — we’ve got to find ways to still keep pushing,” said Tyler Myers. “We don’t want to sit back and have defending be our main focus. The best way to defend is to keep our legs moving, keep puck possession, and get it behind them.”
Head coach Rick Tocchet sounded even more defeated than the Canucks were on the ice.
“Well, we had a gameplan,” said Tocchet in a tone that suggested he had watched that gameplan die before his eyes. And, well, he had. “Got the 2-0 lead and we had a 2-on-1 and we didn’t connect and I think we had a breakaway — couple of missed opportunities — then all of a sudden they had a rush game. We decided to abandon the gameplan.
“We need some guys to rise to the occasion. Whether that’s a middle drive, go to the net — we had shots on net with nobody going to the net. Little disappointed in the grit part of our game.”
I was a lot disappointed in pretty much every part of the Canucks game when I watched this game.
- The worst part is that the Canucks’ collapse completely ruined a perfectly good narrative of Tyler Myers being a badass. Myers took a puck to the throat on Wednesday but was right back in the lineup on Thursday. He undercut his triumphant comeback by immediately taking a delay of game penalty for clearing the puck over the glass on his first shift, but then he totally redeemed himself after.
- “I was pretty stiff today,” said Myers. “Luckily, it was muscle and didn’t hit any bone. So, ultimately it was just stiff. It was fine.” And somewhere Steve Carell spontaneously said, “That’s what she said” and didn’t know why.
- After a solid penalty kill by the Canucks, Myers exited the box and, like Sir Mix-A-Lot when a girl walks in with an itty-bitty waist and a round thing in his face, he got sprung for a 2-on-1 by Drew O’Connor. Myers went old school and blasted a slap shot off the rush like a total boss, drilling the puck into the top corner to open the scoring.
- Myers wasn’t done. With three minutes left in the period, he took a pass from Brock Boeser, faked a shot to freeze his check, then swooped around the net before feeding Pius Suter in the crease for the 2-0 goal. Why Frank Vatrano left Suter that wide open in the crease, I couldn’t say. They don’t tell me these things.
- “Part of my prep is going in not planning to force anything,” said Myers. “I think those opportunities just presented themselves. All the D have the green light to jump in the play when it’s there without forcing things. On those two plays, the opportunity presented itself and we were able to capitalize.”
- Nils Höglander had a golden opportunity to extend the lead to 3-0 before the end of the period. He made a great defensive read to pick off a Mason McTavish pass, then took off down the ice for a breakaway. Unfortunately, like what I assume of most Cold Stone Creamery employees on April 20, Höglander scooped it high.
- “I hope they don’t think that way,” said Tocchet when asked if his team felt like the game was over after taking a 2-0 lead. “The coaches aren’t saying that. You’ve got to be crazy to think that anything’s over. We’re a desperate hockey team. I don’t care if it’s 4-0, you have to keep playing the gameplan. We just had too many guys that, instead of going straight, went right or left. Little too much perimeter for my liking.”
- The Ducks pushed back hard in the second period and Vatrano made up for his lousy defensive coverage on Suter’s goal with a goal of his own. Ryan Strome set him up in the left faceoff circle and he rifled a one-timer top corner over the glove of Arturs Silovs, who was caught a little too deep in his net. Like Hiroo Onoda, Silovs refused to abandon his post, when he needed to push out to challenge the shooter.
- Quinn Hughes came centimeters from changing the game on the next shift. He found some space on the right side and rung the crossbar with a laser of a shot. He was a nightmare for opposing forwards all night as he danced around his check multiple times to create scoring chances. He finished the game with four shots on goal on a game-high 11 attempts but couldn’t beat Ducks goaltender Lukas Dostal.
- Unfortunately, the Ducks counter-attacked after one of Hughes’ shot attempts and scored the tying goal. Elias “Junior” Pettersson, trying to defend on his off-side, gave Cutter Gauthier far too much room, as did Silovs, who lost his angle and went down early, leaving too much room on his glove side.
- With four minutes left in the second, Hughes drew a penalty with some nifty moves to give the Canucks a chance to regain the lead before the intermission. Unfortunately, the Canucks’ power play was the worst thing I’ve seen since Tiptoes, starring Gary Oldman in the role of a lifetime. It was absolutely awful. Depressingly dreadful. Brutally bad. And the power play wasn’t good either.
- That was a turning point, as the Ducks scored right after the Canucks’ unsuccessful power play. It was a 3-on-3 rush but Derek Forbort for some reason came all the way over to the right side, skating less than a Tyler-Myers-length away from Tyler Myers. That left the left side open for Strome and he beat a lunging Silovs for the game-winning goal.
- The Canucks needed a strong push in the third period. They didn’t get it. Instead, they managed just five shots on goal in the final frame, with only one of them looking at all threatening: a backdoor chance on the power play for Jake DeBrusk. Even taking into account that they were playing their second game of back-to-backs, that’s simply not good enough.
- Elias Pettersson, in particular, was completely invisible. Actually, if Pettersson was invisible, he would have been a lot more effective. An invisible player could wreak all sorts of havoc on the ice, unlike Pettersson, who had no shots on goal and the Canucks were outshot 8-to-2 when he was on the ice at 5-on-5.
- The Ducks put the game away with about four minutes left. Radko Gudas was allowed to bearhug Conor Garland while his teammates broke the other way 3-on-2 because the NHL rulebook is like the pirate’s code in that it’s apparently more like guidelines than actual rules. Jackson Lacombe took a pass and caught Quinn Hughes flat-footed for the first time in his life, cutting across the slot before beating Silovs, who dropped into his butterfly approximately three hours too early.
- Hughes, by the way, led the Canucks in ice time with a still-modest-by-his-standards 22:58. It seems he’s back up to speed from his injury, which is at least one good thing the Canucks can take from this game.
- Troy Terry concluded the game with a goal into the empty net with two minutes left after Myers had a point shot blocked by Isac Lundestrom. I don’t want to think about this game anymore.
- “Urgency needs to be high,” said Myers. “We’re in the final quarter here — or we’re getting to the final quarter here — and we’re going to be in the dogfight to the end. Our urgency needs to be as high as it’s ever been this year to finish these last games out.”
