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And Now We Wait — Canucks head into a week off following win over Seattle |
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After a strong 5-2 win over the Seattle Kraken on Saturday night, the Vancouver Canucks now head into a holding pattern.
They're not scheduled to play again until Saturday, when they'll host the Ottawa Senators at Rogers Arena. Then, they hit the road for a five-game swing through the Southern U.S.
That's a very tough stretch that includes the top four teams in the standings as of Monday morning — Florida, Tampa Bay, Carolina and Washington. They'll finish up against the the No. 9 Nashville Predators, who have the best recent record of the bunch — matching the Canucks and the Pittsburgh Penguins at 8-1-1 through their last 10 games.
As of Monday morning, the Canucks sit 19th in the overall standings, and 12th in the Western Conference.
Glass half full: They're three points away from the second wild-card spot, and their 35 points tie them with the two teams slotted above them, San Jose and Winnipeg.
Glass half empty: They're actually 13th in points percentage, moving them behind Dallas. With just 28 games played, Colorado is actually first in points percentage despite sitting in the first wild-card spot. And everybody else is also doing quite well. Out of all the teams that Vancouver is chasing, the only two with records below .500 over their last 10 games are Edmonton (2-6-2) and San Jose (4-6-0).
After Saturday's win, the Canucks took Sunday off. This week, Bruce Boudreau has the club slated to practice every day except Thursday.
Personnel-wise, Jason Dickinson was added to the Covid protocol list on Saturday — after the club's flight to Seattle, so he's probably stuck in the U.S. for a bit.
He joins three other Canucks who were already on the protocol list: Brock Boeser and Phil Di Giuseppe (Dec. 29) and Justin Dowling (Dec. 30).
Meanwhile, Matthew Highmore returned from his upper-body injury last week, before Thursday's game in L.A. He picked up his third assist of the year in Seattle on Saturday night, with the primary helper on Tyler Motte's third-period goal, which proved to be the game winner.
Heading into Saturday's contest, Bruce Boudreau was asking for a better first period from his group. And Jim Rutherford has been talking about how he needs more balanced scoring from his forwards — that all the goals couldn't keep coming from the same handful of guys.
Mission accomplished, on both fronts.
The Canucks outshot Seattle 14-6 in the opening frame and took a 2-0 lead into the locker room. Vasily Podkolzin's game-opening goal was his first in five games, and second of the Boudreau era. And Nils Hoglander's power-play marker was his first in six, coming on a makeshift second unit with Brad Hunt and Oliver Ekman-Larsson drawing the assists.
Last season, Hoglander finished with 27 points in 56 games — just under half a point per game. This year, his goals are still there — with eight in 34 games, he's close to a 20-goal pace. But he has just five assists, giving him 0.38 points per game so far this season.
It's certainly not unusual to see a second-year player take a bit of a dip, offensively. And I like Hoglander's game as a whole. But he's one of the players who could have some upside.
The Canucks' other goals on Saturday came from Connor Garland and Tanner Pearson.
Though Garland has already made it seem like he'll score every time the Canucks play in Seattle, his goal was also his first in six games, and his first point since the holiday break.
Pearson, on the other hand, has been unstoppable. His empty-netter, one of his old trademarks, was his second goal in three games and seventh point in nine games since Boudreau took over. It's not quite J.T. Miller production — he leads the team with 13 points in the Boudreau era after adding an assist on Pearson's empty-net goal on Saturday, and his 36 points for the season have him tied for eighth place in the NHL scoring race, with Johnny Gaudreau and Artemi Panarin. Only two players in the league have more points than Miller since Dec. 5 — Vladimir Tarasenko and Mikko Rantanen, each with 14.
Pearson also picked up the second assist on Garland's goal on Saturday — his second multi-point night in the last four games. And his first-period fight with Carson Soucy gave him the first Gordie Howe Hat Trick of his career — and the third in the last three seasons among the Canucks:
Famously, Pearson lasted just half a season in Pittsburgh under Jim Rutherford three seasons ago — and his production actually wasn't too bad. In 44 games, Pearson put up nine goals and 14 points before being flipped to Vancouver in exchange for Erik Gudbranson at the 2019 trade deadline.
This year, Pearson had eight points in the first 25 games of the season, but now has seven in the nine-game Boudreau era.
If you missed it, Patrick Johnston from The Province, had a chance to chat with Rutherford this week.
My big takeaways:
• Ryan Johnson has impressed him in his first month on the job — and I imagine he has needed to deal with Johnson a lot when managing roster movement and the taxi squad.
In a radio interview on Friday, Rutherford mentioned that the Abbotsford Canucks currently have 'a lot' of Covid cases, which has made that task even more difficult.
As things currently stand, Abbotsford is scheduled to open a four-game homestand against the Bakersfield Condors on Wednesday. I hope the club is healthy enough to make that happen — those games could help fill the void while the Canucks are away from game action.
• While Rutherford would like to get his GM and another assistant GM hired sooner rather than later, he's aware that Covid challenges and the difficulty of poaching executives from other teams in-season could slow down that timeline. I think it's telling that the Blackhawks, Ducks and Canadiens haven't pulled the trigger on new GM hires, either.
Rutherford makes it pretty clear that he wants to hire a first-time GM and mentor him. This certainly doesn't quiet the whispers that Colorado assistant Chris MacFarland could be his first choice.
• And while Rutherford says that forwards who aren't contributing offensively could be the first ones on the trade block if he feels he needs to mix up the roster, he also admits that even for him, it could be very difficult to make deals at this time. He says he wants more voices involved before he makes deals — a welcome suggestion, when it seemed like Jim Benning and John Weisbrod often operated in a vacuum. But additionally, he said that the current roster landscape around the league, with so much fluidity due to the Covid situation, makes it tough for anybody to get on stable ground long enough to be able to make a deal. What's true in one moment could be very different by the next day, or even after a few hours.
Finally — you know things are going well when it takes me until the bottom of the blog to congratulate Thatcher Demko for being named the NHL's third star of the month!
Demko went 7-1-0 in December, with his loss coming before Travis Green was let go. He backed up those numbers with a 1.72 goals-against average, .946 save percentage and one shutout. He allowed two goals or fewer in six of those eight starts — and kept that trend going with two goals against in Seattle on Saturday.
With 27 starts and just over 1,600 minutes played already this season, Demko has also been the busiest goalie in the NHL. All told, he's now at a .920 save percentage and 2.55 goals-against average — the best numbers of his career — and his 15 wins to date are two shy of the league high, currently shared by Freddy Andersen and Andrei Vasilevskiy.
There are a lot of goalies around the league with great numbers this season. Demko's third-star honour underscores that he was the best of the bunch last month.
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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