CANUCKS:
Burrows leads Vancouver to 3-2 overtime victory in St. Louis
ST. LOUIS — Ken Hitchcock wasn’t surprised he got a call from Alain Vigneault last summer.
With a Stanley Cup title on his resume, the new coach of the St. Louis Blues knew that the Canucks bench boss would probably see his team get out of the gate slowly after losing a numbing, seven-game finale to Boston. He knew Vigneault would be looking for direction.
“What do I do next?” Hitchcock said was the question. The answer? “Trust your players, they’ll find the light.”
Hitchcock was right. On a night when the surging Blues wanted to prove they could keep pace with the Western Conference leaders and close a two-point gap atop the standings, it was the Canucks who showed the type of resiliency in a 3-2 overtime win Thursday that the Blues hope to adopt.
“For us, we’re in the evaluation stage against good teams,” said Hitchcock. “When you play against Vancouver and Detroit, we’re the ones who learn the most. They already have that knowledge. We want to know what makes teams like Vancouver tick.”
It’s bending and not breaking. It’s never making too much of a win and not getting dragged down by a loss. It’s striving to be better after allowing the Blues a pair of shorthanded breakaways on one power play and not making excuses for having to play four games in six nights on a successful 3-1-0 trip that started by winning a war in Boston.
“We wanted to finish on a high note and we showed we can play with the best,” Henrik Sedin said of the trip, which also included a shootout win in Tampa and a one-goal loss in Florida. “We could have easily lost this one with the chances they had on our power play. We have to be better.”
After Alex Burrows scored the first of two goals, the Blues wrestled the momentum on Jason Arnott’s second goal. After getting a shot away, the centre backhanded his own rebound and a confused Roberto Luongo couldn’t track a puck that found its way into the net. The Blues held a 20-9 shot advantage at the time and seem poised to put this one away.
“I’m not exactly sure what happened,” Luongo said of the strange Arnott effort. “The rebound went off my shoulder and I kind of thought it went up on the glass and as I turned around to find it, I saw it on the goal line. It somehow might have got caught in my jersey and trickled down my back.
“It wasn’t the prettiest of games. Those guys [Blues] have been playing real well at home and we found a way to get it done and that’s all that matters.”
Hitchcock said he also spoke to Mark Recchi after the former Bruin went off on the Canucks in the offseason, labelling them the most arrogant team he had faced in his 20 years in the game. And he wasn’t surprised to hear that an anonymous Sports Illustrated players’ poll had Luongo and Ryan Kesler ranked fourth and ninth, respectively, as the most overrated players. It comes with the territory.
“It’s because they win,” Hitchcock said of the hated status. “Want to be liked? Start losing and everybody will love you. You think we were liked in Dallas? San Jose wanted to strangle us. As for Boston, you get to brag for a while until somebody knocks you off your perch. You get to toy with them [Canucks] now because you have status.”
That’s all well and good, but you get the feeling that the Canucks are taking the necessary steps to get back to the Cup final. It won’t be easy. Chicago, San Jose, Detroit and now Los Angeles will be high hurdles in the conference and general manager Mike Gillis will have to at least add needed depth before the trade deadline. Maybe more.
However, Aaron Rome may have put it best. After missing a dozen games with his second broken thumb of the season, he logged 15:57 of ice time Thursday.
“I was just trying to get back in the flow of things and I was pleasantly surprised,” he said. “We were kind of in a lull there and there were points where we didn’t play the way we wanted to. If we keep games tight especially in the third [period], we can buckle down and win those onegoal games. We’re confident more than anything.”
Not that the Blues aren’t earning some respect. “They make you earn every inch,” said Vigneault.
That’s what the Canucks have learned to do.