Tuesday February 5 - Washington Capitals 3 - Vancouver Canucks 2
Under-manned and under-rested, the Vancouver Canucks came up just short and dropped their second game in as many nights when they faced the Washington Capitals on Tuesday.
Here are your highlights:
With Alex Edler and Thatcher Demko flying back to Vancouver for medical treatment after Monday's loss in Philadelphia, Travis Green elected to move Chris Tanev to the left side to play with Erik Gudbranson, pair Alex Biega with Derrick Pouliot and lean hard on Ben Hutton and Troy Stecher as his top pairing.
Here's how that broke down by night's end:
Hutton: 28:35, one assist, even plus-minus
Stecher: 25:45, plus-one
Tanev: 16:53, minus-one
Gudbranson: 15:18, minus-one
Pouliot: 17:43, minus-one
Biega: 12:07, minus-one
In a tough spot against a really potent offense, Hutton and Stecher did well, again.
If you're a subscriber to The Athletic, Jason Botchford has some good quotes from Stecher in last night's
Athletties, talking about how the success of the pairing is rooted in their friendship and their similar backgrounds, and how that helps them complement each other on the ice.
Both players have come a long way in earning their coach's trust compared to where they were one year ago.
The Canucks did recall left-side defenseman Guillaume Brisebois from Utica on Tuesday, but he did not make it into the lineup. The Canucks' third-round pick in 2015, the 21-year-old has seen his role with the Comets increase this season. He's 2-7-9 and a plus-one in 45 games.
There's no guarantee that he'll get to make his NHL debut while Edler is sidelined with his concussion, but I'd love to see him get a chance—especially since he's a natural lefty. On a podcast recently, I heard an interesting rationale for why the left-right deployment for defensemen is so much more important now that it was, say, 20 years ago: because the game is so much faster now, there simply isn't time for defensemen to switch their positioning like they could back in the day.
It was nice to see Jim Benning get ahead of the curve when he traded Anders Nilsson and Michael Del Zotto in January, but the team could use both players right now. Even though the Anaheim Ducks have been a tire fire lately, MDZ is keeping his own head above water, with one assist and a relatively respectable minus-three in his first four games even though the Ducks have gone 0-4-0 and given up 24 goals in those four games.
As for Nilsson, he's 4-4-0 with a .922 save percentage and 2.53 GAA since joining Ottawa but has played just once in the team's last four games, giving up five goals in a loss to Pittsburgh on February 1.
With Nilsson gone and Richard Bachman out for the season, the Canucks have been forced to bring up Michael DiPietro from junior as an emergency recall while Thatcher Demko deals with his knee injury.
Jacob Markstrom was fine, again, in a back-to-back situation on Tuesday, stopping 28 of 31 shots. And he had no chance on the game winner—a crazy bank job from behind the net by Jakub Vrana.
All the good vibes of bye week seem to have evaporated pretty quickly for the goalie.
We saw earlier this season how Markstrom started to wear down when he tried to shoulder the entire workload while Nilsson was injured in November. The Canucks' upcoming schedule remains busy, with six games in 10 days starting Thursday in Chicago and including another back-to-back in Anaheim and L.A. next week. Given how the Ducks and Kings have been playing lately, maybe it's not out of the question for DiPietro to start one of those games?
After using Tim Schaller for just 5:18 on Monday in Philadelphia, Travis Green went back to Markus Granlund on Tuesday night—and Granlund rewarded him with his ninth goal of the year. He pulled the Canucks to within a goal in the second period when he converted an Antoine Roussel dish that looked almost exactly like his feed for Jake Virtanen back in Denver last weekend.
Considering the Canucks were badly outplayed in the first period, outshot 18-5, it's a wonder they were in this game at all. In the end, the Canucks outshot Washington 32-31 after a strong final 40 minutes. Braden Holtby was excellent, including his stop on Bo Horvat's penalty-shot opportunity. And Elias Pettersson kept it interesting when he scored his 24th of the year with just eight seconds left to play in the third period, setting up a frantic finish.
The good news for the Canucks: though Tuesday was a busy night for Western Conference teams, most of the other teams in the playoff mix with Vancouver also had tough nights. The St. Louis Blues won their third-straight game to pull within a point of the Canucks, and Chicago came from behind with a big third period to beat Edmonton and move within three points of Vancouver, but losses for Colorado, Arizona, Edmonton and Anaheim mean that the Canucks remain in that second wild-card spot for now.
This also sets up an unexpectedly important four-pointer against the Blackhawks on Thursday night. A win for Chicago would put them just one point behind Vancouver.
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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