Wounded Canucks just refuse to die
Both team and Gudbranson have learned how to take a punch and keep staggering forward
The first punch Erik Gudbranson ever took was from a teammate in junior hockey. Gudbranson was a strapping 16-year-old rookie on the Kingston Frontenacs. The Ontario league team’s heavyweight was a 19-yearold named Peter Stevens.
“I asked him two weeks in, ‘I’m probably going to have to get into a fight, and can you show me a thing or two?’ ” Gudbranson told reporters Saturday after the Vancouver Canucks beat the Toronto Maple Leafs 3-2 in a shootout. “He says: ‘OK, take your helmet off, grab here, grab there.’ And he suckered me as hard as he could, and he said: ‘Learn how to take a punch.’
“That’s the first rule of fighting: you’re going to get hit, so be ready.”
Gudbranson was ready Saturday at Rogers Arena. The defenceman absorbed a couple of big punches from Toronto Maple Leaf heavyweight Matt Martin, but gave at least as good as he took when the players settled their score in the second period.
“If you’re going to do it, make it exciting,” Gudbranson said of the exchange of bombs. “It was a good fight. You guys like it?”
Well, even Elvis wouldn’t have left the building right then.
“I asked him at the faceoff,” Gudbranson explained. “He looked, and we just wanted the refs to kind of go away so we had time to do our thing. It’s unfortunate it was staged. You don’t want to be showing kids that all the time. You want them to be safe and not do that. But, yeah, that was something that had to happen.”
Gudbranson had loudly threatened to kill Martin four weeks ago after the Maple Leaf forward attacked 180-pound Canuck rookie Troy Stecher near the end of Vancouver’s 6-3 loss in Toronto. Thankfully, nobody died Saturday. Both Martin and Gudbranson can take a punch and, apparently, so can the Canucks.
The faster Leafs, their adorable rebuild fuelled by a decade of losing and six, top-eight draft selections headlined by 2016 first-overall pick Auston Matthews, outskated and outplayed the Canucks in the second half of the game, but were foiled by Vancouver goalie Ryan Miller, who had his best night of the season.
Without their top two defencemen, the Canucks survived the Leafs’ surge and blowing a 2-0 lead. They won when Bo Horvat and Markus Granlund scored in the shootout and Miller got his glove on Tyler Bozak’s wrist shot on the final attempt of the tiebreaker, a huge stop that didn’t count among the goalie’s official total of 38 saves.
The Canucks went nearly 13½ minutes without a shot in the third period.
They have only four regulation wins in 25 games, but are 7-2 in overtime and shootouts. And Vancouver has won four games this season when trailing after two periods.
The team isn’t fast enough or big enough or good enough. But the Canucks can take a punch.
Since losing nine straight, the Canucks are 7-4-1 and have achieved this entirely without first-pairing defenceman Chris Tanev and, lately, his partner, Alex Edler.
The Canucks are like Leonardo Di Caprio in The Revenant, mauled by a bear, smothered by an evil trapper and left to die alone in the brutally cold wilderness, rousing themselves from a shallow grave and staggering back to life.
We doubt the Canucks will make it to the safety of Fort Kiowa and pray they won’t have to eviscerate a dead horse and spend a frigid night inside its steaming carcass. But their will to get up and keep going is admirable.
They finished last week’s homestand at 2-1, the same record they achieved in the previous week’s road trip. So under coach Willie Desjardins’ compartmentalization of the schedule into seven-game chunks that reset after four wins or four losses, the Canucks just won their first “series” since their 4-0 start in mid-October.
But now they go back to the Eastern Seaboard for a difficult fivegame road trip that starts Tuesday in New Jersey.
“We’re all hockey players, all competitors,” veteran Canuck Alex Burrows said. “We want to compete in those big games. Internally, the 23 guys in this locker-room, our vision is to make the playoffs. That’s our goal, that’s what we’re going to keep pushing for. If we keep winning games, why not?”
The 35-year-old said Saturday’s game, played in an electric atmosphere heightened by the animosity between the teams — and Gudbranson’s threat — are the kind that he will miss most when his hockey career is over.
“I love the game so much that it’s easy to get up for games for me,” he said. “But when it comes to Canadian teams, it seems the buzz in the building is so much higher. It just fuels your passion, your energy level. That’s what I told (Canuck general manager) Jim Benning after the game: ‘We should have 3,000 Leaf fans every game in our stands.’ “They feel like playoff games.” Burrows said Gudbranson handled himself “unreal” and that he wasn’t worried about his teammate.
We’re not so sure about Gudbranson’s parents, Donna and Wayne, who tweeted “good job” to his son after the fight, noting Erik’s display of “teammanship & character.”
“They knew” what was coming, Gudbranson said. “They used to worry, but I think they know I can handle myself nowadays. They knew it was supposed to happen. My mom probably wasn’t too pleased about it. She never is. But they’re not too worried.
“This was a big one for us. This was a really big one for us, obviously, for all the reasons we’ve talked about.”