Saturday January 23 - Pittsburgh Penguins 5 - Vancouver Canucks 4
The Vancouver Canucks have gone 0-2 against the Pittsburgh Penguins this season after giving up a 3-1 third period lead to lose 5-4 in regulation on Saturday morning.
Here are your highlights:
Before I had even had a chance to settle in front of the TV with my coffee, Jannik Hansen had given Vancouver a 1-0 lead just 27 seconds into the game, beating Marc-Andre Fleury over the shoulder. Hansen added his second of three goals before the end of the opening frame, where Vancouver would outshoot Pittsburgh 10-9—and 32-30 for the game.
They won the faceoff battle, too, with Bo Horvat an excellent 13-for-21 on the draws while Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby were both below 50 percent. But somehow, all those positive indicators led to a third-period collapse kicked off by a Linden Vey own goal, and just the second regulation loss of the road trip.
Vey gets the heat for this, but what, exactly, was Ryan Miller doing on this play?
Once the Penguins narrowed the lead to 3-2, it took just 5:44 for them to take the lead. Malkin was also credited with a hat trick, the 10th of his career, then Bryan Rust chipped in his second of the year. Sidney Crosby's empty-netter proved to be the eventual game winner after Hansen picked up his hat-trick tally with 17 seconds to go in regulation—too little, too late.
Early in the season, late-game collapses were the hallmark of the Vancouver Canucks. Yesterday's stung because we haven't seen one for awhile. And the Hockey Gods unleashed their full fury after Vancouver let its two points slip away—San Jose, Arizona, Colorado, Nashville and Anaheim ALL won on Saturday, which pushes the Canucks down to 10th place in the Western Conference, out of the playoff picture and just two points ahead of the Ducks.
Officially, the All-Star break next week runs five days, with no games Thursday to Monday. The Canucks will be off for a full eight days, with no games from Wednesday to Wednesday—which should do wonders for their health but will also leave them on the sidelines as their Western Conference rivals make up those games in hand. Scoreboard-watching is not going to be much fun over the next 10 days or so.
The Canucks were lucky enough to escape the worst of #Snowmaggedon out East. Better to have played all their games and finished up their visits to all 16 Eastern Conference cities than to have to squeeze in a makeup game at some point later in the season. The way their travel has gone this year, I'll be surprised if many of the guys take off for Mexico or some sunny destination during the All-Star Break. If I was them, I'd be wanting to stay close to home—get some rest and hang with the family. Eight of the team's 11 games during a light month of February will be taking place at Rogers Arena.
Brandon Sutter is expected back in the lineup on Tuesday against Nashville, and it sounds like Henrik Sedin shouldn't be out for too much longer, either. That'll create some interesting lineup decisions for Willie Desjardins.
Mike Zalewski, presumably, is the first guy to be shuffled back down to Utica, but then what? Linden Vey has been up with the Canucks for 15 games since December 18, so he'd need to clear waivers to go back to the farm.
After being scratched for the last two games, I think it's more likely that Adam Cracknell would get the waiver nod. Then, if everybody stayed healthy, Vey and Jared McCann could split duties at centre on the fourth line.
To wrap up today—I'm currently reading "Quinn—The Life of a Hockey Legend," the new book that came out just before Christmas by Dan Robson, who worked with Clint Malarchuk on the outstanding "The Crazy Game."
This Quinn book was slow going for the first half—much like Quinn's hockey career, where he shuffled around for years before finally gaining a foothold as a player. Quinn played just 606 NHL games over nine seasons before retiring as a member of the Atlanta Flames as a result of a broken ankle suffered in a skateboarding accident, of all things, at age 34.
From my point of view, the action in the book picks up when Quinn begins his coaching career and, especially, when he signs on to become the general manager of the Canucks in December of 1986—while he was still employed as coach of the Los Angeles Kings.
Robson does a good job of explaining how that situation came to pass and why Quinn believed he had the right to negotiate with the Canucks—basically, the Kings failed to exercise the option to move him into their GM's chair, as had been originally discussed when he first joined the team.
Round these parts, Quinn is lauded for choosing our current team president Trevor Linden with the second pick of the 1988 draft, after Mike Modano was off the board. Robson mentions some other very solid talent that was also available in that 1988 draft pool, which made me look at the full list from that draft.
I like Trev a lot—for both his on-ice contributions as a player and for how he's currently running the organization. But just to stir the pot, imagine if Quinn had chosen differently...
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I've left some other players from the class of '88 who hit the 1,000 game mark off this list, including Curtis Leschyshyn (third overall), Martin Gelinas (seventh overall), Tie Domi (27th overall), Mark Recchi (67th overall), Tony Amonte (68th overall) and Keith Carney (76th overall). Alex Mogilny and Joe Juneau were also late-round selections in that deep draft year.
Other than Linden, the only player from Vancouver's 1988 draft class to play more than 100 NHL games was seventh-rounder Dixon Ward, who played 537 games with the Canucks, Maple Leafs, Sabres and Rangers.
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