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Vancouver Canucks hope to ride re-worked power play to a win in Vegas |
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Sunday March 3 - Vancouver Canucks at Vegas Golden Knights - 1 p.m. - Sportsnet Pacific, Sportsnet 650
Vancouver Canucks: 65 GP, 27-29-9, 63 pts, sixth in Pacific Division
Vegas Golden Knights: 66 GP, 35-26-5, 75 pts, third in Pacific Division
After spending the last two days in Sin City, the Vancouver Canucks will look to wrap up their three-game road trip with a .500 record if they can manufacture a Sunday afternoon win over the Vegas Golden Knights.
Note the early start time: 1 p.m. PT. That's a quick turnaround for the T-Mobile Arena conversion crew. Saturday night was UFC 235 and according to their Instagram stories, a fair number of the younger Canucks were in attendance.
I guess their performance in Sunday's game will depend in large part on what they did after the fights. Afternoon games often tend to be a bit sleepy, but maybe that big dose of testosterone will pump them up?
Travis Green did gather his troops at the Golden Knights' practice facility in Summerlin on Saturday afternoon for a high-intensity practice. Not surprisingly, the lines are being shuffled again after Horvat-Boeser proved to be a grim combination defensively against the Coyotes. Adam Gaudette is being moved up the depth chart and will get a chance to play with Boeser.
Travis Green devoted half an hour to working on the sputtering power play, with these combinations:
The problems with the man advantage predate the Canucks' recent swoon. After coming back from their bye week hot against Colorado in early February, Vancouver has gone 3-7-3; during that stretch, the power play has been 3-for-44—a conversion rate of just 6.8 percent. Of course, most of those games were also played without Alex Edler, who takes a lot of criticism for his power-play production but is generally the go-to-guy on the blue line.
If we go back further, the numbers are a bit better, but still not good. In the month between Christmas and the All-Star break, with Edler in the lineup, Vancouver was 6-3-2 but still just 4-for-35. That's an 11.4 percent conversion rate—double digits, at least, but still well below where successful teams need to be.
Things started so well, too. For the year, the Canucks are still at 15.0 percent — again, much better than recently, but that still ranks them 27th overall. The "average" power play right now belongs to Dallas, at 20.2 percent while Tampa Bay leads the way, not surprisingly, at 28.9 percent.
It is surprising that two of the three teams below Vancouver are actually in the playoff hunt: Nashville in 30th place at 12.5 percent and Montreal in last at 12.4.
Speaking of playoffs, results around the league didn't do the Canucks many favours over the last couple of days. Minnesota knocked off Calgary on Saturday night to move back into the second wild-card spot with 70 points, now seven up on Vancouver. And with their 4-0 win over Columbus on Saturday, the Oilers caught Vancouver with 63 points and moved ahead in the standings by virtue of the tiebreaker. The Canucks go into Sunday's games in 13th place in the Western Conference, only ahead of Anaheim (57 points) and Los Angeles (56 points).
Last season, the Canucks were eight games below .500 on March 1, then went on a seven-game losing streak before finishing out the season strong with a 6-1-2 record to end the year with 73 points.
This year, they're currently just two games below .500. They'll need 10 points in their last 17 games to get to 73, which seems achievable. Even including their recent rough patch, they're 6-8-3 for 15 points through their last 17. If they can match that record through this final stretch, they'd finish the year with 78 points: still below .500, but that would actually be their best showing since that 101-point performance in Willie Desjardins' first year behind the bench in 2014-15.
As for Vegas—I don't know if you heard, but the Golden Knights made a pretty significant move at the trade deadline when they won the Mark Stone sweepstakes.
Stone picked up his first point in a Vegas uniform on Friday—an assist—in the Golden Knights' 3-0 shutout win over Anaheim. The team is now 3-0-0 with Stone in the lineup, after having been bumping along with some mediocre performances prior to his arrival.
Now nine points behind San Jose and six up on Arizona, Vegas looks pretty locked into third place in the Pacific Division. That will probably set up an intense first-round playoff matchup between the Knights and the Sharks—somebody's gotta lose!
Offensively, Vegas is a middling team this year—with two 20-goals scorers, Max Pacioretty and Jonathan Marchessault, and eight guys with at least 10 goals, including defenseman Shea Theodore. Wild Bill Karlsson's at 19-21-40 through 66 games—not exactly matching his 43-goal pace from a year ago, but still showing that he's more than the single-digit scorer he'd been before landing in Vegas. Just two players are on Vegas' injured list: forwards William Carrier and Erik Haula.
As for Marc-Andre Fleury, he's tied for the NHL lead with 31 wins and leads the league with seven shutouts, but the 34-year-old also leads the league in games and minutes played. Jacob Markstrom is now fourth in both those categories, by the way, and his .913 save percentage is better than Fleury's .910. That's the goaltending matchup we're expecting to see today.
That should set you up for today's game with at least a couple of hours to spare. Enjoy!
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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