Miller blanks Predators
Regardless of where you stand on Willie Desjardins — we predict he’ll finish the season fired or in the coach-of-the-year conversation — he has the Vancouver Canucks playing hard every night.
Take Tuesday. Missing a handful of players to injuries and illness, the Canucks were slightly outplayed and badly outmuscled in the opening period. Then they got out of their comfort zone and started pushing back against the Nashville Predators, who were passed by Vancouver in the National Hockey League standings when Henrik Sedin banked the puck in off goalie Pekka Rinne with 7:32 remaining in the third period.
The Canucks aren’t skilled enough, fast enough, tough enough or deep enough, and we haven’t seen their power play since Donald Trump was someone we could laugh at. And yet here they are at 7-1-3 since the Christmas break, 21-19-6 for the season and, despite a lot of things gone wrong, tied again for the final wild card playoff spot in the Western Conference.
Yeah, they won 1-0 against the Predators. What, were you expecting 7-6?
The Canucks are a 1-0 or 2-1 team because they have to be. This is what Desjardins has to work with. And working is the one thing the Canucks do at an elite level.
Even with Desjardins’s exasperating stubbornness to change his power play or his lineup, his love for a fourth line that never scores and his bias for experience over youth, it’s hard to imagine the Canucks could be any higher in the standings.
OK, if their power play were only poor instead of horrendous, they’d be higher. But if you listed all the problems the Canucks had then looked at the standings, you’d have to conclude the coach must be doing a few things right.
On a night that exemplified the team’s work ethic, the greatest scorer in franchise history decided it when Hank Sedin took the end-boards rebound from Luca Sbisa’s quick shot on a fouron-two rush and backhanded the puck against Rinne and into the Nashville net.
It was Sedin’s 999th point. He’ll try to become the 85th player in NHL history — and the first Canuck — to reach 1,000 points when old friend Roberto Luongo and the Florida Panthers visit Vancouver on Friday.
For the second straight game, the Canucks benefited from a video review that overturned an apparent goal against. So they’ve got that going for them, too.
We’re actually not sure if it was a review or a royal commission, but after a tediously long delay at 15:10 of the first period, referee Ghislain Hebert put away the noise-cancelling headphones and announced he had intended to the blow the whistle before Derek Grant forced the puck out from under Miller’s blocker and across the goal-line.
The most alarming aspect of the hack-and-whack sequence is that Miller was the most physical Canuck while the Predators excavated with impunity.
But Hebert meant to blow his whistle, presumably right before he pointed emphatically at the puck as it slid into the back of the net, and the Canucks escaped the period with a couple of bruises and a scoreless tie.
They may have compared bruises in the dressing room during the intermission because when the second period began, Vancouver played with at least a little physical aggression against a Predators team that wasn’t figuring on pushback with rugged Canucks Erik Gudbranson and Derek Dorsett out indefinitely with injuries.
Alex Burrows, Jack Skille and Brendan Gaunce threw hits for the Canucks, and Nikita Tryamkin threw about a dozen. It’s like the big Russian was channelling his combative defence partner, five-foot-10 Alex Biega. Tryamkin, six foot seven and 260 pounds, is big enough to eat Biega.
As we’ve noted before, the difference between Tryamkin becoming an NHL player and becoming an impactful NHL player hinges, at this early stage, on his willingness and ability to play physically each night. At his size, Tryamkin doesn’t have to do much — just lean on people and finish checks. He did that in the second period against the Predators and made a difference.
Nashville enforcer Cody McLeod ran wild and uncontested in the first period — on one memorable shift, he hit Loui Eriksson away from the puck, raked his stick on Sedin and bumped Miller — but was given pause when Tryamkin loomed over him after a post-whistle exchange in the second period.
The increased intensity by the Canucks was probably not coincidental to their increased scoring chances. But the score remained 0-0 after Daniel Sedin missed the net on a two-on-one, Troy Stecher shot high from the hash marks and Rinne stopped Eriksson when the Canuck was in alone on goal.
Not discouraged, the Canucks kept working — as always.