Devilish little details hold key to Canucks’ salvation
Back in those heady days of mid- and late- October, when our hearts were light and goals were coming easy, the Vancouver Canucks offered some hope that the worst was finally over.
And who knows? Maybe it is. Their young team, they’ll tell you, is close. Frustrated, but close.
They still have glittering young talent and the makings of a competitive team. They just have to stay positive and they ’ll work their way out of this.
At least that’s what they’re telling themselves, and when you’re in their position, that’s something you have to believe.
The reality is, the last month has revealed something else about these young Canucks, something about the brutally unforgiving nature of playing in the world’s toughest league. Saturday afternoon it was failure to contain an elite NHL player. Thursday night it was an egregious error on a penalty kill. Other nights it’s been something else: goaltending, a wonky power play, an inopportune bounce — pick your poison, but it all leads to the same place.
At this stage in their evolution, they lack that certain something, the hard edge, the experience, the mental toughness, to win on a consistent basis in the NHL.
It was easy when the Canucks were scoring five goals a game and Elias Pettersson was making magic on a nightly basis. But in the NHL you make your living in the trenches of 2-1 and 3-2 games, and that’s where the Canucks are losing.
“These are the games you’re going to play a lot down the road and you have to find ways to win them,” Canucks coach Travis Green said after his team’s 2-1 loss in the Saturday nooner with the Dallas Stars.
“You have to find a way to manage the puck, to be strong on the puck in certain areas. We talked about that right away after the game.
“This was a game, in my mind, we lost down the stretch. It was different than the Vegas game where we made mistakes. This was their veteran guys, their heavier guys, took over.”
The heaviest of those guys was Victoria’s Jamie Benn, the West’s best power forward, who cashed in a rebound midway through the third period, then won a puck battle with Markus Granlund with 31/2 minutes left before setting up Alexander Radulov for the gamewinner.
Those 10 minutes squandered a superb goaltending performance from Anders Nilsson, a heartand-soul effort from Bo Horvat and a decent game from a group that shut down the Stars’ attack but didn’t produce enough on the offensive end, particularly on a power play that went 0-for-4.
Those, at least, were the game’s main talking points. But the larger story embedded in the Canucks’ graceless fall over the last 11 games lies in those areas Green goes on about after every game: the detail work with the puck, the board battles, the competition in the most-contested areas. It is those places where teams make their living in the NHL and, right now, the Canucks are a day late and a dollar short in every one of them.
“That’s the difference in the game,” Green said.
“It happens fast. We were playing a real stingy game for 50 minutes and all of a sudden the momentum shifted and it shifted fast. Their big guys smelled some blood and they took over.”
The Canucks’ big guys, meanwhile, were shut out over the last two periods when one goal would have made all the difference.
True, there was Brock Boeser hitting a post in the final minute, but there wasn’t much else over the final 40 minutes and we can tell you one thing we’ve learned over all the years of covering the NHL: It’s hard to win a game with one goal.
Again, that wasn’t an issue when Pettersson was lighting it up over the first month but, like a couple of his younger teammates, the boy wonder is absorbing a pointed lesson on life in the NHL.
“He’s seeing the best defencemen now,” said Antoine Roussel. “Maybe they’re shading towards his side. Petey is great, but this is a hard league.”
The irrepressible Roussel was just getting warmed up. Clearly steamed after the one-goal loss to his former team, he alternately cursed under his breath while railing against the events that brought the Canucks to this place.
At one point, he referenced Nathan MacKinnon’s red-hot start with the Colorado Avalanche, his struggles in Years 2 through 4, then his emergence as a full-blown superstar. Somewhere, he implied, there was a lesson for Pettersson as well as the other Canucks youngsters.
“We’ve got to go at it, face the challenge and rise up. We can’t just go out there and hope for better, you know? We’ve been cracking a little bit after 55 minutes and that hurts. We’re a young team, but you’ve got to learn quick in this league or sometimes you get tossed away and change comes in quick,” said Roussel.
“Everybody’s got to learn that. We’ve really got to get our s--t together and win some games.”
And maybe one day they ’ll learn that lesson. But right now they’re just learning that same “stuff” Roussel talked about just happens in the NHL.