SUNRISE, Fla. – The Vancouver Canucks are one game away from a perfectly bad road trip, an early end-point to an awful season.
Before their five-game survival test began – the television show Naked and Afraid doesn’t compare to the Canucks in the wilderness – it was difficult to see a city where they might win: Winnipeg, Pittsburgh, Tampa, Sunrise, Fla., and Raleigh, N.C.
The most winnable game was here against the Florida Panthers, last year’s Presidents’ Trophy winners but one of the few National Hockey League teams that rival the Canucks for underachievement this season.
But that opportunity slid by Saturday night when Vancouver surrendered two more leads and two more power-play goals and lost 4-3 to the Florida Panthers to fall to 0-4 on this odyssey. The Canucks have scored 15 goals in four games against difficult opponents and haven’t salvaged a point.
And Sunday’s game against the Carolina Hurricanes is arguably the most difficult of them all, coming less than 24 hours after the Florida game and against a Stanley Cup contender whose speed and suffocating pressure are usually poison to the Canucks.
Vancouver has lost four games in a row for the first time since opening the season 0-5-2, and the Canucks are in danger of having their first 0-5 road trip in a non-pandemic season since 2014.
That was two teams ago now for Canucks coach Bruce Boudreau, who could soon be fired for the third time since then. Of course, we’ve been saying that since October due to the lousy start and even poorer relationship between the coach and senior management.
There was nothing redeeming about those seven straight losses in October except that the Canucks still had 75 games remaining. But losing feels a lot worse in January because the team, which has lost six of its last seven games, has already torched so much runway that they’re already out of room for a takeoff.
Even in isolation, all that losing is exhausting mentally. But then there is the unending, debilitating drama around the Canucks. Twitter ratings were boosted this week alone by the Tanner-Pearson-Injury mystery, a healthy scratch of their most expensive player (Oliver Ekman-Larsson) and reports, including Saturday’s by Elliotte Friedman, that Boudreau is likely to be replaced by Rick Tocchet.
It feels like a critical mass of negative energy was reached some time ago. This road trip is just piling on.
“It’s pretty difficult right now,” Boudreau said after Saturday’s loss. “Like I mean, it’s just, it’s hard to take. I don’t think anybody likes losing. Fans in Vancouver, the players hate it in there, we hate it on the coaching staff. It’s just, you know, the only thing you can do is you get up tomorrow and you go back to work and you give it again. The one thing I’ll say is the last three games, for sure – I mean, it’s too little too late – but I mean, we didn’t quit. It tells me that the team still wants to win every time they go on the ice.”
And yet they achieve it so rarely.
Saturday was the 20th time in 42 games the Canucks have opened the scoring in a game. They have won nine of those.
Florida goalie Sergei Bobrovsky gave the Canucks a gift when he ignored Jason Studnicka’s lob from 50 feet that made it 1-0 just 95 seconds after the opening faceoff. Vancouver held that lead for just over six minutes.
When Bobrovsky failed to see another point shot through traffic, a 60-foot wrist shot by Tyler Myers 39 seconds into the middle period, the Canucks held their 2-1 advantage for 67 seconds.
The team plays its best hockey when it’s behind, which has become a frequent predicament in the second half of games.
“We have a really hard game tomorrow and if we’re not ready, it’s just going to keep going the wrong way,” winger J.T. Miller said. “It’s really easy to want to go down the poor-us road, but we can’t do that. We have a hard part of the schedule; we knew it was going to be hard. There’s a lot of one-goal games. We’ve just got to find a way to just get a little bit more from every person.”
Or a successful penalty kill. The Canucks’ historically inept, NHL-worst penalty killing surrendered easy goals to Aaron Ekblad and Aleksander Barkov on its first two disadvantages as Florida pulled away to a 4-2 lead in the second period.
Elias Pettersson scored a power-play goal in the third for Vancouver but Bobrovsky, who was raspberried by home fans early in the game, made a bunch of strong saves at the end as the Canucks outshot the Panthers 38-35.
“This is where mental toughness comes into play,” Myers said. “When you’re going through a stretch like we are right now, it’s easy to get down mentally. I’ve been there before and that’s the last thing you can do as an individual and as a team. You have to come out the next night and get yourself up and come ready to work.”
If these are Boudreau’s final days, the players are still working for him. They just make too many mistakes.
“I just wake up every day and go to work until they tell me not to,” Boudreau said.
“It’s not just Bruce,” Miller said. “We want to win for each other because when you play for each other and win more games. . . it becomes contagious, as we saw last year.”
That was a long time and a lot of drama ago.
