More shots should mean more goals
Forget everything you know.
The Canucks can score. Travis Green thinks so.
He said he has a team that could be offensively average, maybe better.
“I think we do have that, but it’s easy to say,” Green said.
If they still stopped the presses, this would have done it. Mostly because he said it and no one laughed.
Things have been that bleak here for some time. The Canucks have gone from a goal-scoring powerhouse to a punchline. It didn’t even take five years.
You think driving in the snow in Vancouver is challenging? You should see the Canucks trying to score. The goal-scoring has been so bad for so long it’s made the Whitecaps jealous.
Since 2015, no team has made scoring look harder. For the past three seasons, including this one, the Canucks are averaging 2.24 goals a game. No team has scored less. Let that marinate. And to think people still wonder why there are attendance issues.
If you think goals are entertaining, and many of us still do, the Canucks have been the least entertaining team in hockey, and not for a short period.
But things seem to be changing. In the past two games, the Canucks combined for 81 shots. Yes, those were all on net. Of course, they still lost both games and scored only a single goal.
There are a couple of ways to look at this. One, the Canucks just
played their two best games of the season and still couldn’t score.
Two, there is this universal truth in hockey: The teams that shoot the most, score the most. In other words, goals are coming. Hallelujah.
“Not only are we playing a good transition game in the offensive zone, but I think we’re defending extremely well,” Green said.
“We ran into a couple of hot goalies, and that happens. You need a longer look at those kind of nights to say whether we just can’t score or not.
“I don’t believe that (we can’t). We have guys in the room who have scored 20, 30 goals. They were snake-bitten the other night.”
It’s OK to remain skeptical. The three forwards on the Canucks’ top line, Bo Horvat’s, have one 20-goal season combined.
The team’s second line, Brandon Sutter’s, is being deployed as a matchup-shutdown trio and that seems to be limiting offensive opportunities for Markus Granlund.
The six men playing defence combined for a total of 14 goals last season.
And the Canucks’ two lines with the forwards who have the most offensive pedigree, lines that include the Sedins and Thomas Vanek, are seeing the least amount of ice time.
Plus, the Canucks are 23rd in the league in shot attempts per 60 minutes at even strength, and 21st when it’s 5-on-4.
So how again is this team going to score any goals?
Well, they piled up 145 shot attempts in the past two games and they took a high number of those attempts in scoring areas.
“It’s not a matter of just shooting pucks at the net and hoping they go in,” Green said. “Shot attempts are a big factor in analytics. But scoring chances are one of the stats I look at.
“Not only have we done a good job generating attempts, but we’ve had a lot of scoring chances. When you combine those two numbers, that’s important.
“We have to keep at it.”
The Canucks are doing more than “keeping at it.” They are tweaking some things that will be obvious and some that won’t.
The obvious part came in the Canucks’ power play work Friday. Brock Boeser was playing the left circle, which is the old Radim Vrbata spot, with the Sedins. This is a better use of Boeser’s shot and could lead to good things.
The coaching staff also met with players in video sessions to make other changes.
“It’s been frustrating,” Vanek said.
“I’m actually not a big believer in analytics. I think that’s for baseball. But the way we played last game, there was a lot of ‘Get puck to the D and get to the net.’
“We still have to get better at getting to the net and staying in front of the net. On defence, they could hit the stick off to the side more.
“Those are things we’re still learning as a group. We need to figure out the ‘how can we do it?’”
That’s been a question goal scorers have been asking here for years.