Who knew Super Bowl would be a sleeper?
For long-suffering Canucks fans, playoffs are no longer the stuff of fantasy
Wouldn’t expect too much but we hope this edition of the Monday-morning musings and meditations on the world of sports is more entertaining than the Super Bowl:
After playing a starring role in three straight epic Super Bowls, perhaps the New England Patriots were due for a dud.
And say this for coach Bill Belichick’s team. They delivered on that count Sunday.
But whatever else Super Bowl LIII was, it added another entry to the Pats’ legend. In the big game, they’re now 6-3 in the Belichick-Tom Brady era and that mark won’t be threatened any time soon.
That is noteworthy enough. But doing it while producing 13 points, sorry, didn’t see that coming.
In the end, this was reminiscent of one of those gawd-awful Super Bowls from the 1970s — Baltimore-Dallas in IV; Pittsburgh-Minnesota in IX — which, one supposes, featured some great defences and not much else.
As for Sunday, the score was close and Brady again found a way that will be remembered even if most everything that preceded it was forgettable.
With the name players on the block — Mark Stone, Matt Duchene, Chris Kreider, Wayne Simmonds, Artemi Panarin etc., etc. — and the number of teams in the hunt, this year’s trade deadline figures to deliver a few noteworthy deals.
The wild card will be the teams fighting for a playoff spot. Don’t see it in the Canucks’ future, but it might make sense for a team like Dallas or St. Louis who are under some pressure to produce this season.
As for the Jake Muzzin deal that kicked off the trade watch, Canucks fans can look at the price the Maple Leafs’ paid to the Kings — a firstrounder, a decent prospect in Carl Grundstrom and former second-rounder Sean Durzi — and reasonably wonder
what Alex Edler might fetch. But, that’s more an intellectual exercise than anything.
For starters, as a pending UFA, Edler wouldn’t command that kind of package. The Canucks are also intent on extending their best defencemen, so there’s that.
As for the three assets it seems like a haul. Grundstrom will play and Durzi has a chance. But both are second-tier prospects and the Canucks already have a number of those in their system.
With what the Canucks have coming, it makes more sense to hang on to Edler.
On a related noted, it didn’t generate a lot of heat at the time but the deal that brought Tyler Motte at last year’s trade deadline has worked out well for general manager Jim Benning and the Canucks.
It’s doubtful Motte will ever be a big scorer but he can play
a matchup role on the fourth line and give you minutes and some production. He’s also just 23 and there might be more to come.
Benning squeezed 61 games and 17 goals out of Thomas Vanek, then turned him into a useful player in Motte. That’s as much as you could hope for in that kind of trade.
And finally, at the start of this season Canucks fans might have entertained the thought of making the playoffs but neither did they take it too seriously. You can understand why. When you’ve endured 28th-, 29th- and 26th-place finishes over the last three campaigns, you learn not to set your hopes too high. The faithful were willing to settle for some improvement in their team and a handful of meaningful games in March. Anything
else, just didn’t seem realistic.
And maybe that’s the way 2018-19 will play out. But at the very least, it might be time for fans to rethink their position.
Heading into Monday night’s game in Philly, the Canucks sit in eighth place in the West, holding down the final playoff spot ahead of six teams who are within five points of the locals. Yes, the picture seems to change daily and one three-game losing streak can bury any aspirant.
But the Canucks also have a couple of things working in their favour as they head down the stretch.
First, and most importantly, there’s the schedule. At the conclusion of their current four-game roadie, the Canucks will have 27 games left. Sixteen of those will be played at home and seven of those are against teams that
currently sit below the playoff bar.
Coach Travis Green’s team is also healthy for the first time this season and the depth of their lineup showed up Saturday when 11 different Canucks hit the scoresheet in the win over Colorado.
OK, not every game is going to play out so perfectly, but if you were wondering how the Canucks are going to pull this off, the clues were revealed against the Avs.
The stars you know about and there’s an expected level of production from the Horvat-Pettersson-Boeser nexus. The trick will be getting contributions elsewhere in the lineup; specifically from Green’s two pet projects: Jake Virtanen and Nikolay Goldobin.
With 30 games left on the team’s schedule, Virtanen has 12 goals and Goldobin has 24
points. All other things being equal, the Canucks will make the playoffs if Virtanen hits the 20-goal mark and Goldobin reaches 40 points. That will give them secondary scoring and a second power-play unit while making life infinitely easier for The Big Three.
There are a couple of other things that have to break for the Canucks and the most important is a big stretch run out of Jacob Markstrom, who would sit second behind Pettersson for the team’s Hart Trophy if the ballots were counted today.
But the point is the playoffs no longer seem like a wild fantasy. Dare to dream, Canucks fans.