Saturday February 7 - Vancouver Canucks 5 - Pittsburgh Penguins 0
Well, that was a treat! Fresh off one of their worst games of the season on Thursday against the San Jose Sharks, the Vancouver Canucks rebounded with one of their best, beating the visiting Pittsburgh Penguins 5-0 on Saturday night at Rogers Arena.
Here are your highlights:
I followed the Penguins pretty closely through the first half of the season, and they do have some Jekyll-and-Hyde tendencies. Also, there seem to be some teams that they just can't beat, like the New York Rangers (in last year's playoffs and 1-2-1 this season), the New York Islanders (1-3-1 this season) and—yes—the Vancouver Canucks (0-2-0 this season, shut out twice).
The Canucks were lucky enough to face backup Thomas Greiss in both their games this season, but that doesn't explain how they were able to shut down the Penguins' offensive stars on two separate occasions.
There was plenty of buzz in the building on Saturday night thanks to the visiting Captain Canada, Sidney Crosby, whose legacy in this town still revolves around his gold-medal-winning goal in the 2010 Olympics. But after a strong offensive performance in Calgary on Friday night, where he scored two goals, Crosby was held to just one shot on goal in 18:55 of ice time.
The exciting part? Crosby, Kunitz and Perron spent parts of the night matched up against Bo Horvat, Jannik Hansen and Derek Dorsett, who were effective as a shutdown line *and* scored a nice first-period goal to make the score 2-0. Horvat's ice time has been growing in recent games, to a season-high of 14:59 on Saturday night. He also held his own in the faceoff circle—6-for-8 against Brandon Sutter, 3-for-5 against Evgeni Malkin and a respectable 3-for-7 against Crosby.
Pittsburgh has been notoriously bad on back-to-backs this season, with a record of 2-5-3, so some of the Canucks' success could be attributed to a sub-par effort from the opponent.
Still—great to see goals from five different players, and to see a game of solid team defense even without Chris Tanev, Frank Corrado and Kevin Bieksa. Special teams were also good: the Canucks finally got their first clean sheet on the penalty kill since Bieksa's injury, going 4-for-4, and got two power-play goals in five opportunities, from Alex Burrows and Daniel Sedin.
The Canucks are now off to Minnesota and Chicago for a short road trip before returning home to face the big bad Boston Bruins on Friday the 13th.
This trip is a special one: Vancouver's first fathers' road trip since Trevor Linden's last year as a player, 2008:
These special family road trips have become quite a common occurrence all around the league. I saw the Ducks' dads at our arena when Anaheim was in town coming out of the All-Star break, helpfully attired in their sons' replica jerseys.
It hadn't occurred to me that the Canucks weren't participating in the tradition during the Mike Gillis era but I'm glad to see it back in the mix. I think it's a great way to give back to the parents who did so much to get their kids to the NHL, and I bet a lot of the sons give that little extra when they're playing in front of their fathers.
Quick Hits:
• Zack Kassian got back into the lineup for the first time in a week and had a productive 8:21 of ice time, fighting Robert Bortuzzo in the first period and taking full advantage of a terrible Thomas Greiss giveaway for a gift goal in the second, on his only shot of the night.
Kassian was lauded with a roar from the Rogers Arena crowd when the goal was announced. I'm sure he's relieved to have rippled the twine for the first time since October 21.
• It wasn't a tough night for Ryan Miller, and he got some help from an inconclusive video review in the second period, but his shutout is the sixth of the season—tying his career high and tying him for second place in the league right now with Braden Holtby. Marc-Andre Fleury is the NHL leader with eight.
• Daniel Sedin's power-play goal was the 115th of his career, which is a new Canucks franchise record. He passes Markus Naslund to take over top spot.
• With the win, the Canucks leapfrog Calgary back into third place in the Pacific Division. The Flames play the Sharks next, on Monday night in San Jose.
The win improved Vancouver's playoff chances by 6.5 percent. They continue to sit with comfortable odds of 89.2 percent of getting to the playoffs, according to
SportsClubStats, who project the Canucks' most likely final position to be fourth (!) in the Western Conference (41 percent chance). Vancouver is currently seventh, so those games-in-hand still count for something, statistically.
However—with 61 points in 51 games, the Canucks are in exactly the same place they were at this point in the schedule last year. The difference? That 51st game came on Jan. 21—the 2-1 win over Edmonton that marked the first game of the coach's suspension. After that, Vancouver went 1-8 through to the Olympic break. These next couple of weeks should be where we start to see this year's record take a different path from what happened last season.
Botchford has a great quote from Alex Burrows on how this year is different from last year, in
his latest edition of
The Provies:
Should we be giving Desjardins even more credit for losing his marbles on Friday, and dressing down the team at practice?
“It wasn’t TOO bad,” Burrows said.
“We had it a lot worse last year. On a good day.”
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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