Shut out in L.A. is just a royal pain
Canucks kept it kinda close and had three power plays. How’s that for a moral victory?
DLOS ANGELES ustin Brown said the Vancouver Canucks have nothing to play for. He was right, and he was wrong.
Drew Doughty said he has nothing but respect for Henrik and Daniel Sedin, whom he lumped in with Ryan Getzlaf and Sidney Crosby as the game’s smartest players. He was kind.
Travis Green issued nothing but a fair warning that Monday’s date with the Los Angeles Kings was a game his club couldn’t hide from. It would be a big boys’ game. He was honest.
A lot was said, but talk is cheap and reality is cruel.
Put it this way: When the Canucks clobbered the Kings 6-2 on home ice Jan. 23, Loui Eriksson and Brock Boeser scored twice while Thomas Vanek and Sven Baertschi also scored. The line on those forwards now reads rib injury, back ailment, traded and separated shoulder.
If you really want to get nostalgic, it was a Nov. 14 meeting in L.A. where Bo Horvat and Boeser were added to a 14.1 per cent power play that struck twice in a surprising 3-2 win.
All that only magnified the injury-riddled, navel-gazing plight of the Canucks, who are saying all the right things about effort and execution. But the only forward to score in the last four games is the 34-year-old Jussi Jokinen, and he sat out Monday.
At least the Canucks drew three power plays. They had but one in each of their previous four outings. So there’s that.
Here’s what we learned as the Canucks fell 3-0 for their fourth straight defeat since the Boeser injury:
The wings and the prayers
Tyler Motte with Bo Horvat and Brendan Leipsic, Nikolay Goldobin with the Sedins and Sam Gagner in the Boeser sweet spot on the first power play — none of it made much sense.
Jake Virtanen started on the fourth line and then replaced Motte and then found himself with the twins and was stopped on a backhand chance early in the third period.
Motte is decent in a forechecking capacity and the penalty kill and maybe Green thought his initial line would score in transition. Goldobin, who had but four first-period shifts for 2:35, doubled it in the second, but he didn’t really move the meter.
And Gagner taking a feed from Alex Edler and trying to replicate Boeser’s power-play shot from the dot was a shot in the dark. Gagner went high and wide on an evenstrength chance with half the net to shoot at. That says a lot. He hasn’t scored in 20 games.
Daniel nearly had his 22nd in the second period, but goaltender
Jonathan Quick had an acrobatic left-pad kick.
Nilsson shows some moxie
Three games in four nights, including back-to-backs, means it’s traditional to split the cage.
Jacob Markstrom played well enough in Arizona on Sunday to get the call again, but the struggling Anders Nilsson got the chance to regain lost confidence. With a 1-102 record in his previous 13 outings, a paltry .889 save percentage and bloated 4.05 goals-against average, he really had nothing to lose.
The Kings lost 7-2 to the St. Louis Blues on Saturday in their worst home-ice loss in nearly 10 years. They can’t afford to lose ground in pursuit of a playoff position. If Nilsson got lit up, it wouldn’t be the
end of the world. If he showed up, it would at least be a moral victory.
Nilsson was on his knees when Tyler Toffoli took a long pass from Jake Muzzin, sped past Derrick Pouliot and went glove side early in the second period to open scoring. He wasn’t to blame for a re-directed pass that gave the Kings a two-goal cushion. Then Ben Hutton couldn’t clear the puck and Tanner Pearson outwaited a sprawled stopper to put the game away.
Nilsson did stop Jeff Carter and Toffoli twice in the first period.
Is help on the horizon?
Chris Tanev could play Wednesday in Anaheim. You could argue why?
After missing 15 games with a leg microfracture, the defenceman took the optional morning skate Monday
and is anxious to face the Ducks. But with all those fire drills on the back end — Edler had three giveaways Monday, Pouliot had a pair and Hutton struggled on the walls — somebody needs to make the smart defensive-zone reads, play well positionally and move the puck.
“He’s possible,” Green said. “We’ll just have to see where he’s at Wednesday. He wants to play and I want him to play. I want him to end this season playing some good hockey down the stretch and be ready to come back.
“He’s such a big part of our defensive core. When players are out, I try not to think about it and I don’t know how many games he has missed. But we miss him drastically.”