Saturday March 26: Vancouver Canucks 4 - Dallas Stars 1
Monday March 28: Vancouver Canucks at St. Louis Blues (4:30 p.m. PT)
After a rousing and rare win in Dallas on Saturday night, the Vancouver Canucks will continue their push for the postseason when they visit the St. Louis Blues on Monday.
Note the earlier-than-usual start time for a game in St. Louis: puck drop is at 4:30 p.m. PT, and the game is being broadcast nationally on Sportsnet as part of Rogers Hometown Hockey.
Now 4-3-3 in their last 10 games, the Canucks can move within one point of the second wild-card spot with a win on Monday. But they can't climb any higher than 10th place.
It was a pretty good weekend for Vegas and Winnipeg, who both grabbed two points in their last games thanks to overtime wins.
• the Golden Knights now sit eighth in the West with 76 points in 68 games
• the Stars are ninth with 75 points in 64 games
• the Jets are 10th with 74 points in 67 games
• the Canucks are 11th with 73 points in 67 games
According to
SportsClubStats, the Canucks' playoff chance as of Monday morning is 18.2%. A regulation win tonight would increase that number by 7.9%, while a regulation loss would drop that number by 5.4%.
They've got Vegas at 37.9% and Winnipeg at 12.3%, with Dallas still at 73.9% thanks to their games in hand.
MoneyPuck pegs Vancouver at 14.1%, with Vegas at 44.7% and Winnipeg at just 4.5%.
As I'm sure you're aware, the Canucks and the Golden Knights have three head-to-head matchups coming up in early April. Those games are going to be huge when it comes to determining both teams' playoff fates.
But first, the Blues. They're coming into Monday's contest on a two-game losing streak, losers of three of their last four and with a record of just 3-6-3 in the month of March.
It's hard to get a read on this team. Their three wins this month have all been impressive outings over good opponents: 5-2 over Washington, 7-4 over Nashville and 6-2 against the Rangers. But they've also suffered multi-goal losses against a couple of non-playoff teams: 5-2 against Philadelphia and 4-1 against Ottawa, with a mixed bag of closer results in between.
With outcomes that are all over the board, it's hard to read too much into any averages. But goaltending has been an issue in March. The Blues are averaging 3.75 goals against per game, tied with Toronto for fourth-worst in the league.
Ville Husso has been confirmed as starter on Monday. He was outstanding earlier in the season and still boasts a solid 12 goals saved above expected this season.
Husso is at only 28 games played this season, but has been seeing the lion's share of the starts for St. Louis since early January. This month, he's 3-3-2, but his save percentage is just .889 and his goals-against average is 3.39.
Now 27, the only other start of his career against Vancouver came on Jan. 23, when the Blues skated out of Rogers Arena with a 3-1 win in Mikey DiPietro's lone start of this season — a game where Vancouver outshot St. Louis 39-17.
The Blues made just one move at the trade deadline, picking up depth defenseman and 2013 Stanley Cup winner Nick Leddy from the Detroit Red Wings. For the moment, he's needed to help fill the void left by the absence of Torey Krug, who's out week-to-week with an upper-body injury. Forward Tyler Bozak is also on the shelf, with a lower-body issue.
As for the Canucks — the big news is that Bruce Boudreau is going back to Jaroslav Halak in net.
Halak, of course, spent four seasons in St. Louis between 2010 to 2014 and had one of his best years there in 2011-12, when he finished sixth in Vezina Trophy voting and shared the Jennings Trophy with Brian Elliott as the tandem with the fewest goals allowed that season.
After his terrific performance in Colorado last week — and with Thatcher Demko deserving some rest after his heroic game in Dallas on Saturday — this could be a prescient play for Boudreau.
The Canucks have a relatively light schedule this week. They'll host the Blues when they return to Rogers Arena on Wednesday, then they're off until Vegas comes to town on Sunday. But they have a road back-to-back next week, in Vegas and Arizona, so it seems like good strategy to keep both netminders engaged and hopefully make it easy for them to split the duties as needed.
Thomas Drance of
The Athletic is covering this trip from the road, and reports that the Canucks' lineup at Monday's morning skate looks the same as what we saw in Dallas — with Matthew Highmore still sidelined and Kyle Burroughs skating as the extra defenseman.
And speaking of Saturday in Dallas — any lingering concern I may have been carrying about Elias Pettersson's recent upper-body injury was erased in that game. Not only did he score his 19th and 20th goals of the season and receive first-star honours, he also looked confident and hungry throughout the game. He finished with four shots on goal out of seven attempts, and I loved seeing him rotating aggressively on the power play and calling for the puck from his patented spot on the the right half-wall.
Don't look now, but if he can build off Saturday's performance, Pettersson has a legitimate shot at hitting a new career high for goals. With 15 games left in the season, he's currently at 20. His high, set in his rookie season, was 28.
To close today — as I'm sure you've heard by now, with NCAA signing season in full swing, the Vancouver Canucks will have to wait a little longer to find out if they'll be able to bring in winger Aidan Mcdonough from Northeastern.
Mcdonough's camp announced on Sunday that he'll be returning to college for his senior season. Donnie and Dhali got him on their show on Monday, where the 22-year-old emphasized that he felt it would be best for his development to spend one more year at the NCAA level — and hinted that he still feels he needs to work on his speed and strength.
I don't want to read too much into this situation, but it is a departure from what we saw during the Jim Benning years. As worried as fans were about college players like Thatcher Demko, Brock Boeser, Quinn Hughes and even Jack Rathbone when they were drafted, they were all brought under contract in a timely fashion.
Now, there's a real possibility that Mcdonough could play out his senior year and decide to sign elsewhere as a free agent. And don't discount the now-deep ties between Northeastern and the Montreal Canadiens. The sons of GM Kent Hughes and coach Martin St. Louis are both Mcdonough's teammates, and this season's captain, Jordan Harris, was a third-round pick by the Habs in 2018 who has just signed his entry-level deal in Montreal.
But Harris also played a full four years before joining the team that drafted him. And it's worth remembering that the NCAA experience has been dramatically altered for these student athletes during the pandemic — both in hockey terms, especially with no Frozen Four at all in the 2020 season, and in terms of the social and academic experience due to all the isolation along the way.
Also, the group that is now trying to sign Mcdonough isn't the same braintrust that drafted him. When he was selected back in 2019, Judd Brackett was still leading Vancouver's scouting department.
For the moment, Mcdonough is saying the right things about coming to Vancouver.
It's crazy to think that the Canucks haven't been able to hold a proper summer development camp since 2019, just days after Mcdonough (and Vasily Podkolzin and Nils Hoglander) were drafted. Hopefully he'll be able to come back out again this summer and further cement his ties to the organization before he heads back to school.
Enjoy the game!
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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