Red-hot Flyers next for confident Canucks
Younger players in Vancouver getting first taste of what important late-season games are like
PHILADELPHIA — Antoine Roussel will get a rude reception here Monday night and the agitating winger wouldn’t have it any other way.
The Vancouver Canucks veteran knows legendary leather-lunged Philadelphia fans either have the utmost devotion or utter disdain for their sporting heroes — whether it’s on the ice, diamond, football field or basketball court. They love winners. They hate losers.
That emotional sporting-populace pendulum has swung to a full-on love-in with the Flyers, a team that gained notoriety this season for tying an NHL record by using seven goaltenders because of indifferent play, injuries and odd crease management.
Then the league’s hottest club rattled off seven straight wins thanks to 20-year-old stopper Carter Hart, who was named rookie of the month for January, to climb out of a hole and into Eastern Conference wild-card playoff contention.
The Wells Fargo Center has always been a tough place to play. It could be a zoo Monday.
“Philly is a nice place to play,” Roussel deadpanned. “A lot of emotions and the fans are great and they’re going to dislike us — even if we only play there once a year. It’s awesome.
“I feel like it’s going to be a good game because they play an uptempo game and usually an open game. It’s going to make us be smart with our pressure and smart with everything, and I think we can beat them.”
And why not?
The Canucks cleared the first hurdle on this four-game trip Saturday with a 5-1 decision in Denver to move ahead of the Avalanche and into the second wild-card spot. The high-octane trio of Gabriel Landeskog, Nathan MacKinnon and Mikko Rantanen, who have a combined 79 goals and 199 points, was held off the scoresheet.
“It was a really good effort — from start to finish our guys were ready,” said Canucks coach Travis Green. “We were just better with the puck and our breakouts were a lot better, especially early in the game. And our wingers were stronger on the walls and all four lines were good. And our penalty kill was good.” That’s a lot of good. A healthy roster that’s playing hard and consistent — to go with clutch goaltending from the more poised and consistent Jacob Markstrom — has allowed the Canucks to dream of what could be.
It’s only February, but it feels like April. You hear it in the tone of anticipation from young and veteran players alike. You see it in the confident manner in which they have embraced what many believed was another year away — a legitimate shot at being in the playoffs for the first time since a first-round, six-game exit against the Calgary Flames in 2015.
“Even before the break, we played some important games to stay in this hunt,” said defenceman Troy Stecher. “We’re becoming accustomed to the pressure and the circumstances that we’re under and hopefully that will pay off down the stretch.
“The last two years, we wanted to make the playoffs, but we were pretty far out of it, but being a pretty new guy in the league, I still treated those games as being important. To play these meaningful games, there’s just something a little extra to it.”
Veterans can draw on post-season experience, but how do younger players who haven’t been in the biggest fight prepare for the next 10 weeks?
Jay Beagle won a Stanley Cup last season with the Washington Capitals. Alex Edler and Chris Tanev came within a victory of winning it all in 2011. Stecher and Brock Boeser captured an NCAA title with North Dakota in 2016. And Markstrom backstopped the Utica Comets to the 2015 Calder Cup final on an AHL team in which Sven Baertschi, Jake Virtanen and Ben Hutton logged games that season.
“I haven’t been fortunate enough to make the (NHL) playoffs yet, but when you lose one, you’ve got a couple of games to rebound,” Stecher said.
“In college, you have one bad (playdowns) game and you’re done. The first year for me (2014), we lost in the (Frozen Four) semis with .06 seconds left to go to the national final. The second year, we lost in the semis and my third year we finally won it.
“Every year, we learned something new and that really showed in the year we won it and how we played in the final game. All the butterflies and nerves were gone.”
Maybe Baertschi put it best about trying to extend this season past mid-April. He played on potent Portland Winterhawk teams that lost in the WHL final in 2011 and 2012. You can learn a lot from winning and losing at any level, but what he’s experiencing as an NHL winger is on a different level.
“This is an amazing feeling and it’s why you work so hard in the summer,” he said. “We’re right there and now the feeling is different in the room than it has been in the past. A lot more confidence and knowing we can beat any team and get on a streak.
“You can tell the excitement is there. Everybody is fired up.”