After a fun, energetic game the other night against the Avs, the Canucks… did that in San Jose. A 2-1 OT game. A win’s a win, and the Canucks are 5-1-1 in their last seven. Not shabby. With that victory and Calgary’s loss, they’re back fully in the playoffs. Highlights are here:
After coming off a shutout two nights prior, Demko was solid again and should have picked up another shutout, but a last minute goal by former friend Tyler Toffoli spoiled that party. It set up a dramatic end to the game where Drew O’Connor scored on an OT penalty shot. At least that was exciting? Because the rest of the game was pretty meh. The Canucks offense looked stagnant once more, they finally scored a PP goal in the third after generating zero shots on their first two attempts, and their top players were again quiet on the evening. Against a lowly Sharks team, it didn’t instill a great amount of confidence.
"Demko was great, so was their goaltender. I think we could've gotten the puck to the net a little bit more," Tocchet said. "In an 82-game schedule, you are going to have these games where you're going to have to grind it and find a way to win.
“We can’t have any passengers.”
I remember him saying all that about a bunch of other games this season. Oh well, two points heading into their last game before the break.
The new guys have been a revelation for the team since coming over, and again they had their fingerprints all over the game. O’Connor won the game on a penalty shot after it was set up from a good Chytil feed.
"They had a chance down on our end and we got a big save," O'Connor said. "I just tried to beat my guy up the ice. It was a nice play by [Filip Chytil] to get it over to me."
Tocchet is happy with what O’Connor adds to the team: “Obviously the speed, he really adds a lot to our team. That was obviously a big goal for us. Just a real coachable kid. He wants to learn.”
The Canucks fly back to Vancouver to take on the Leafs on Saturday. It’s going to get rowdy before that game, both in real life and in the blog, so I’m going to say this:
*The comments section the past couple weeks has taken a nosedive into toxicity. It’s not ideal on the best of days, but these past few weeks have gotten much worse. Insults, personal attacks, accusations about player’s sexuality, group nicknames (stop trying to make fetch happen), non-stop train-of-thought posting… it’s creating an environment where people are tired of coming to. Makita checked in last night and decided to lock the blog because of how bad it was. It’s a bit dumb to have to write this out – though maybe it’s actually fitting with you lot – but it needs to be better or I’ll just ask Makita to come back and lock the threads and start handing timeouts to people. We can all be better, and a bit more mannered.*
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