Have the Vancouver Canucks turned a corner?
The team and its fans certainly hope so, after Brandon Sutter's first career hat trick fuelled a feel-good 7-1 win over the Ottawa Senators on Monday night.
The two teams will now meet again for back-to-back games on Wednesday and Thursday. Nate Schmidt is hoping his group is getting on a roll.
Wednesday's game is Vancouver's ninth, at the two-week mark of the season. It's tough to identify meaningful trends — for every rule, it seems like there's an exception or a contradiction.
Here's an example: after Bo Horvat was briefly tied for the league lead in scoring on Monday night with 10 points, he has been bumped down into a tie for sixth going into Wednesday's game. The weird part: eight of the league's top 12 scorers are from Canadian teams.
We've got McDavid and Marner leading the way with 12 points, Draisaitl and Ehlers at 11, Scheifele tied with Horvat at 10, and Copp and Connor and nine.
The only four American players in the mix are Mark Stone (11 pts), Anze Kopitar (10 points) and the Nova Scotia boys Brad Marchand and Nathan MacKinnon (nine points each).
I wonder if that trend will last??
I also love
this chart on Hockey Reference, which compares season averages in a bunch of different categories.
The funny part is that the league-wide goals-against average is currently identical to last season, at 2.82 goals per game. But save percentage is down from .910 to .905 — understandable, since goalies weren't able to do their usual preparation. But — while you'd never know it from watching Canucks games — average shots per game are down as well, from 31.3 over the last two seasons to just 29.8 so far this year. I take that as indicating that skaters haven't dialled in their full accuracy yet this season, either.
And it's interesting that shots are down even though that the number of power plays are way up from last season — 3.61 per game compared to just 2.97 last season, but still well below what we saw coming out of the 2004-05 lockout, when teams were getting nearly six power plays a game as the league cracked down on obstruction.
Still — this year's power-play conversion rate is the highest we've ever seen, with clubs connecting 21.5 percent of the time. But all power plays are not created equal by any stretch. Anaheim is 0-for-16 through seven games and is one of five teams below 10 percent, while Dallas is an astonishing 9-for-16 through just three games, drawing penalties like crazy and capitalizing at a rate of 56.3 percent. Wow!
The Stars are one of eight teams that are currently connecting at over 30 percent — including Toronto and Calgary from the Canadian Division.
Even though they got seven goals on Monday, the Canucks went 0-for-2 with the man advantage. They've scored power-play goals in just two of their eight games so far and are at 4-for-31 on the season. They're second behind Colorado in the number of penalties drawn, though they've played more games than many teams. But their success rate is 24th, at 12.9 percent.
Of course, that correlates to Elias Pettersson's scoring funk. On Monday, it was brilliant to see four goals from Vancouver's bottom six, plus two from the blue line, including the first in the NHL for Olli Juolevi. The seventh goal was credited to Tanner Pearson but was the result of some very nice work from Nils Hoglander, who continues to impress even as the rest of the league gets up to game speed.
Petey, Boeser and Miller were the only Canucks players to come up minus for the night — on the ice for Ottawa's lone goal by Austin Watson. The microphones caught Miller shouting expletives of frustration at one point in the game.
And while there has long been talk in the analytics community that Pettersson's lofty shooting percentage would have to regress, I don't think anybody expected it to drop from 19.4 percent in his rookie season to 16.7 percent last year — to 5.6 percent so far this year, with just one goal on 34 shots so far.
I'll put this out to the universe and see if it helps:
I was looking at
Pettersson's 2017 draft class yesterday, and noticed that his 134 career points are just one fewer than first-overall pick Nico Hischier. There's a big drop after that: Robert Thomas of St. Louis is third, with 79 points.
Petey has currently played 62 fewer games than Hischier — but Hischier hasn't played yet this season due to a leg injury. And while it wasn't expected to be a long-term thing, he still isn't skating with the Devils.
So here's how I see it: while Hischier's out, this is a clear path for Petey to take over first place in his draft class. And if he can do it, he can probably stay there for a long time. It'd be a nice jetstream for the fifth-overall pick to ride for awhile, don't ya think?
As for these next two games, I do expect we'll see a grittier effort from the Sens in these next two games. Austin Watson certainly did his bit, with the lone goal and two fights.
Based on the lines from Tuesday's practice, it looks like Colin White and Cedric Paquette are drawing back in up front in place of Artem Anisimov and Alex Galchenyuk, and Tim Stützle is moving up a line after returning to the lineup from injury on Monday.
On the blue line, veteran Braydon Coburn will replace Josh Brown.
As for whether the Canucks would make big organizational chances if this season does continue to go south, Elliotte Friedman suggests in the latest
31 Thoughts, that everybody needs to pump the brakes on that idea.
I can’t imagine ownership is thrilled with the way the season’s begun, but I don’t sense any desire to do something rash. This season presents unique challenges, which makes change riskier and more difficult to complete. You’ve got to lean into the headwind.
He does acknowledge that conversation has occurred between the Canucks and former L.A. Kings' assistant GM Mike Futa, who's currently moonlighting as an analyst at Sportsnet.
"I don’t believe these conversations are new," Friedman says. "There was contact several months ago with GM Jim Benning, but nothing available."
Don't forget: it's an early start on Wednesday for Sportsnet's national broadcast, at 5 p.m. PT. Thursday's game is at the usual 7 p.m. PT start time.
Enjoy the games!
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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