ONE COOL CANUCK
NO FOLDING IN THE CREASE Thatcher Demko saved the Canucks’ season with a 42-save playoff debut Tuesday. Will he get an encore?
The beaming grins shared by Quinn Hughes, Elias Pettersson and Brock Boeser when they were asked about Thatcher Demko’s cool demeanour said a lot.
The goalie goes to bed early, Hughes said. He eats right, Hughes added.
“I think we all knew Thatcher was going to be really dialed in,” the Vancouver Canucks’ rookie defenceman said after Tuesday night’s white-knuckle 2-1 win against the Vegas Golden Knights. “I don’t think anyone was surprised with how well he did.”
Demko grinned when he was asked about his sleep habits.
“I think it was lights out maybe at 10:05, 10:10. These guys go to bed a little bit later,” Demko said of his Monday night bedtime. Boeser laughed, obviously painting a picture in his own mind of some sort about the goalie’s nighttime routine.
That Demko reported no issues falling asleep Monday night wouldn’t normally be notable but for the fact he’d been told sometime in the hours before he hit the hay that he’d be starting for the Canucks in a do-or-die Game 5 in place of Jacob Markstrom.
Markstrom has been a standout for his team in the NHL playoffs but it’s clear the grind has caught up to him. He started 14 games in 27 days, remarkable for a guy coming off a 4½-month break and an injury.
No goalie has faced more total shots in the playoffs than Markstrom, albeit both Darcy Kuemper (Coyotes) and Corey Crawford (Blackhawks) faced more on a per-game basis.
During the regular season Demko started once out of every five games or so. If the Canucks had followed a similar starting rotation, he might have played three times at Rogers Place in Edmonton.
Markstrom’s workload appears to have resulted in a groin issue. That’s a tricky injury for a goalie. The fact the Canucks’ coaching staff made the call to start Demko a day earlier suggests this wasn’t a minor injury.
The Canucks’ players say they were never worried about Demko heading into Game 5, trailing the Golden Knights 3-1 in the best-ofseven series.
“He’s an unbelievable goalie and he’s a gamer,” Boeser said.
Whether he starts again Thursday for Game 6 is anyone’s guess. To no surprise, head coach Travis Green wasn’t showing his cards on Wednesday. If the Canucks win tonight, Game 7 will be played Friday night.
LOCKING DOWN THE SLOT
The Canucks’ first-round series win over the St. Louis Blues was built off the strong play of Markstrom, the Canucks getting enough goals off their power play and also playing solid defence in front of their goalie.
They did a good job of limiting rush chances against and also made it difficult for the Blues to get to the slot, where the best scoring chances usually happen.
The Golden Knights have had much more success in finding the middle of the Canucks’ defensive zone than the dethroned Stanley Cup champs ever did.
“You’re not always going to win pretty in the playoffs,” Travis Green said Wednesday, noting the Canucks were badly outshot in the Game 5 win.
The Canucks started slowly, struggled in the second period but righted the ship in the third and seized the win.
“A pessimistic person can say we didn’t respond. An optimistic person can say that, you know what, we responded in a way that we found a way to win a hockey game,” the bench boss added.
Defenceman Oscar Fantenberg said the Canucks success against the Blues in keeping the slot clear hasn’t been repeated against Vegas.
“We’ve got to be better,” he said. “But overall I think we’ve been playing pretty good defensively.”
Fantenberg’s defence partner Tyler Myers, who watched the first three games of the series from the press box, giving him a unique perspective to analyze the team’s performance, said he and his teammates been putting extra pressure on themselves by not controlling the puck.
Ending up under pressure in your own end starts with what you’re doing at the other end of the ice, he said.
“We can do a better job of doing our stalls,” Myers said, referring to the team’s forecheck doing a better job of stalling the Vegas breakout. Slowing down Vegas will only lead to good things for the Canucks.
“We’ll have the puck more and eliminate a lot of their opportunities,” he said. “We’ve got to get a little step quicker.”
An optimistic person can say that, you know what, we responded in a way that we found a way to win.