Maple Leafs coast to easy 5-0 win over road-weary Vancouver
Toronto has become the deep and powerful team the Canucks hope to be down the road
The Canucks hope they got a glimpse of their own future Saturday in Toronto, losing 5-0 to the very impressive Maple Leafs.
If it was a vision of Vancouver’s rebuilt future, there’s plenty of work still to be done.
“That’s a good measuring stick of where we’ve got to be and how much better we’ve got to get,” Bo Horvat said after.
The Leafs attack in waves. They have crisp, quick breakouts. They rarely turn the puck over. And they won despite starting goalie Michael Hutchinson, up on emergency recall from the American Hockey League.
They can do these things because they’ve assembled a squad of forwards who are all threats to score and a defence corps that can skate and move the puck with accuracy.
How deep are the Leafs? Nazem Kadri is their thirdline centre. And they are both the future and present of hockey.
To get there, the Canucks will need to find more skilled young forwards to play alongside, and behind, the likes of Elias Pettersson, Brock Boeser and Horvat. And they need to find multiple young defencemen, who one day will take the place of Alex Edler and Chris Tanev at the top of the rotation, as well as reinforce the bottom end.
Up front, there appear to be two or three intriguing options in Utica, N.Y. On the blue-line, there is Quinn Hughes. There’s also Olli Juolevi, who was playing well enough in Utica before injuring his knee to suggest the NHL is in his future.
But in all this, nothing is a guarantee. Even with the rise of Pettersson and strong seasons from Horvat and Boeser, the search to continually upgrade must carry on.
The Leafs burst out of the gates Saturday and were up 2-0 before the first period was over, getting goals from John Tavares and Trevor Moore.
They got three more in the third, from Auston Matthews, Andreas Johnsson and Igor Ozhiganov.
Here’s what else we learned at Scotiabank Arena:
TOUGH SLEDDING
“We’re a blue-collar team,” Canucks coach Travis Green before the game.
Without Pettersson in the lineup, scoring was going to be tough sledding. Even with him in the lineup, the Canucks had been shut out in three of their previous six games.
Scoring hasn’t been a major problem this season, though much of that has been supplied by Pettersson and Boeser lately, and a lot of Horvat before that.
The Canucks actually took plenty of shots against the Leafs, but getting into the dirty areas, like on New Year’s Eve in New Jersey where they lost 4-0, proved a tough thing to do.
“In Montreal (on Thursday), we definitely generated more chances,” Brandon Sutter said.
There was plenty of talk this week about looking to generate more point shots and to look for tips in front. The Canucks did reasonably well on that front, but in the end Hutchinson only had a few tricky moments to deal with.
SCORERS DO THEIR THING
All Tavares needed was a little gap and he got position on Canucks defender Erik Gudbranson, setting up his chance to tip the puck that became his 27th goal of the season.
Tavares was next to Gudbranson behind the Canucks’ net but found a moment to separate himself from the big blue-liner. He got to the front of the net and was in a nice tripod when Morgan Rielly’s point shot came sailing toward the net.
Gudbranson gave Tavares a shove but the sniper’s elite positioning held firm.
FIRST TIMERS
Whether it’s true or not, the story goes that big career moments always happen against the Canucks.
This is probably because Wayne Gretzky played against the Canucks for so long and the Great One was always setting records.
The latest entry in this book is Leafs rookie Trevor Moore, who netted his first career goal in the first period, firing a shot off the rush past Jacob Markstrom, after dancing past Derrick Pouliot.
“You look at all the goals, there was a mistake,” Green acknowledged.
The Toronto crowd went wild. Moore, who hails from the swanky Los Angeles suburb of Thousand Oaks, managed to keep his composure on the bench even as his big moment was replayed on the video board above centre ice.
THIRD-PERIOD PULL-AWAY
After a scoreless second, you knew it was going to be a big mountain for the Canucks to climb, but it didn’t seem impossible.
The Canucks hadn’t taken a penalty through 40 minutes —they wouldn’ t for the entire game — while managing to draw three penalties to earn power-play opportunities.
As elite teams do, however, the Leafs found a whole other gear in the final frame, getting three goals. Two perhaps involved some luck, but one was a pure piece of skill.
“I thought we looked tired tonight and that’s not a team that you really want to play tired against,” Green said. “I thought we hung in there for two periods but couldn’t contain them in the third.”
Matthews scored on a wraparound, Johnsson picked the corner above Markstrom, and Ozhiganov’s centring pass deflected off Gudbranson.