TWO FOR THE ROAD
Canucks overcome injuries to Sutter and Edler with second straight win
Before Tuesday night’s game in Denver, coach Willie Desjardins took stock of the Vancouver Canucks’ situation and pronounced, “Finally, after all the injuries, all the trials and tribulations, we have our team together and we’re ready to roll.”
And the Canucks were. For 30 minutes.
“There’s no reason we can’t start playing the way we can play,” the Canucks head coach said Wednesday, recalling that heady halfgame when the Canucks had a full lineup. “That’s how I felt. And the team was excited. The team felt the same way.
“We were confident we were still there in the hunt. Now it’s a matter of finding a way again. You have to battle and you have to stay in it until we get healthy again.” If that day ever comes. On Wednesday, the Canucks announced that centre Brandon Sutter, who’d just returned after missing 2½ months with a sports hernia, suffered a broken jaw in the second period of the 3-1 victory over the Avalanche. The timeline for Sutter’s return is unclear, but it’s conceivable he could miss the final two months of the season.
That wasn’t the only bit of cheery news from Tuesday. Defenceman Alex Edler went down later in the second period with a broken fibula after inadvertently blocking a shot. Edler is gone for two weeks at a minimum, but if he returns in a fortnight, the Canucks should buy a lottery ticket.
“They’re difficult injuries in all facets of our game,” Desjardins said. “I was thinking maybe penalty killing, but it’s a right-handed draw man (Sutter), two guys on the first unit of the power play. They’re big losses.”
To counteract the big losses, the Canucks called up veteran defenceman Yannick Weber and forward Alex Friesen from Utica. That leaves Desjardins with an assortment of lineup choices, all of which are infinitely inferior to the team he put on the ice against the Avalanche.
In Vancouver’s 2-1 win over the Coyotes on Wednesday, Alex Biega drew in for Edler and Adam Cracknell played in Sutter’s place, but there was one further bit of intrigue to play out.
About two hours before the game, Desjardins said Cracknell had been promoted ahead of Jared McCann because he likes the more-physical veteran against Coyotes centre Martin Hanzal. But minutes before the opening faceoff, the Canucks reported Derek Dorsett had come down with an illness and McCann made his first start in three games.
“There’s a lot of things you’re juggling,” Desjardins said. “There’ll be second-guessing. It’s not like they’re 90-10 decisions.
“Forty per cent of the people are going to think you’re wrong one way or the other. It’s trying to do what’s best for the player and the team. That’s the call.”
Desjardins, in fact, says he’s now at the point where he second-guesses himself. At least he has some company in that regard.
“After the game, it’s easy,” he said. “If you lose, you should have gone the other way and I’m the first to say, ‘That wasn’t the way to go.’ If you lose, you wish you would have tried something else.”