VANCOUVER — Not all hockey in Vancouver is hopeless, it just feels that way around the Canucks.
Look at Mathew Barzal, the pride of suburban Coquitlam, zipping around his hometown ice Tuesday, uncontested and faster than anyone else, and putting up three points in the New York Islanders’ 6-2 win over the Canucks at Rogers Arena. Even better, look at North Vancouver’s Connor Bedard, apparently an ardent Canucks fan, who is making history for Team Canada at the world junior championship while waiting to be the National Hockey League’s next big thing.
Imagine what a player like Bedard could do for a team. Imagine what he could do for the Canucks.
Well, dare to dream because Vancouver’s team is finally moving away from the mushy middle of the NHL standings. They’re heading south, towards the bottom.
The Canucks’ third consecutive loss, all against superior teams that simply outclassed them, left Vancouver 25th in the overall standings with a winning percentage of .473. At 16-18-3, the Canucks are seven points out of a playoff spot in the Western Conference and just four points ahead of the fourth-worst team in the league, the San Jose Sharks.
Determined losers like the Chicago Blackhawks and Anaheim Ducks, who answered that spam call that always arrives around dinner time and encourages desperate teams to undertake a complete tear-down rebuild, look uncatchable at the bottom of the standings.
But the Sharks are catchable, the Arizona Coyotes can be ducked under. And only three games into a 12-game stretch against formidable opponents, a schedule that so far is proving to be truth serum for the Canucks, Vancouver looks like it could soon be in the bottom five of the league.
They play the Colorado Avalanche, with Nathan MacKinnon back in the lineup, on Thursday, then embark on a five-game road trip that goes: Winnipeg, Pittsburgh, Tampa, Florida, Carolina.
Bedard is not an impossible dream as a first-overall draft pick. Except that there’s a draft lottery and these are the Canucks, who have never moved up in the annual draw for draft position.
But at least there’s hope – not from the Canucks, but for them. They just have to keep doing what they’re doing.
If they play the way they did Tuesday against the Islanders, they might not win another game. Until they play the Blackhawks.
After Vancouver built a 1-0 lead with a sound, robust opening period, the Canucks self-destructed over the next 22 minutes, allowing four out of five goals.
A fourth-line goal by Aatu Raty tied it for New York at 1:46 of the second period when Tyler Myers’ position in no-man’s land created a two-on-one that Quinn Hughes poorly defended.
Jean-Gabriel Pageau got inside on Hughes to scuff in a power-play rebound at 12:56, and then Myers passed the puck to Barzal in the Canucks’ slot to make it 3-1 at 16:28 although the NHL considers goals like this “unassisted.”
After Bo Horvat scored his second of the game for Vancouver at 18:54, the Canucks took advantage of this momentum by needlessly turning over another puck in their slot — this time it was Ethan Bear to Anders Lee ––to make it 4-2 just 1:46 into the final period. And that was that.
“We keep giving them goals, you’re not going to win games,” Canucks coach Bruce Boudreau said. “I mean. . . in the second period, the first two goals we gave them. The third goal, the power-play goal, we sort of gave them (because) we didn’t get it out. And then in the first shift in the third period, we give them another pass. You keep giving teams passes and putting pucks on their tape, you’re not going to win.”
How could another second-period disaster occur after a first period when the Canucks were the better team and a little unlucky not to have put more than one puck behind Islander goalie Ilya Sorokin?
“God knows,” Boudreau said. “I thought the first period was as good a period as we’ve played. (But) as soon as something bad happens to this team, the adversity, we cannot handle and it seems like ‘oh, here we go.’ And then that’s it. As long as we’ve got the lead we’re fine, but when we get behind, it’s not a good thing. It seems like the wind goes out of everybody’s sails.”
And that’s what suddenly feels different about the Canucks. Until the last couple of weeks, they were like a streaky but talented golfer who might make a double-bogey but could follow it with an eagle, then birdie the 18th to win. Now they look like they have the yips.
The Canucks had six shots in the third period. And they blocked three shots in the game. The Islanders blocked 18.
“We mention it every day,” Boudreau said of blocking shots. “We talk about it every day, we put it on the wall every day. We understand it. (But) I can’t go out and make them want to block shots. But I mean, they know. . . any team that has any success, they do it. That’s a commitment.”
The Canucks were so awful at the start of last season that their coach and general manager were fired. Their record through 37 games is now identical to last season, and they’re trending the wrong way. Or the right way. (Be positive!)
“If you sit there and say: ‘OK here, we need 27 wins over the next 40 games,’ then it’s a daunting task,” Boudreau said of the growing chasm between the Canucks and a playoff spot. “If you win the week, eventually you get there. (But) if you say you need 10 wins in a row, it’s pretty hard to do.
“Nobody’s stupid in there. They know the daunting task. They know the wins and losses and everything. We’re just fortunate at this point that it seems like most of the teams in the Pacific Division don’t want to jump up and run away. They keep giving us life. But eventually, we’ve got to get our own life.”
Or win a draft lottery.
