VANCOUVER – We were going to tell you about the bad luck in the first period, and then the bad plays in the second.
We were going to explain that even with what has been a magical mystery tour this season for the Vancouver Canucks, who have two regulation losses since Dec. 5 and are on a 9-0-2 run, there are nights when it’s not going to go your way.
But then, after being down three goals in the third period, it still went the Canucks’ way. So we’re telling you now about another Vancouver win, its 33rd in 49 games heading into the National Hockey League All-Star Break.
And to do that, we’re going to start with Brock Boeser, who scored a hat trick Saturday and then set up Elias Pettersson’s overtime winner in a 5-4 victory against the Columbus Blue Jackets. Because Boeser embodies everything that used to be wrong with the Canucks that now seems inexorably right.
Nearly six years after serious back and wrist injuries halted his rookie season at 29 goals, the 26-year-old from Minnesota finally became the 30-goal scorer in the NHL he promised to be when his rebound tap-in at 6:28 of the third period tied the game 4-4, barely five minutes after the Canucks had trailed 4-1.
In the intervening years, Boeser visited hell and back, dealing with other injuries, the anguish of his father’s illnesses and death, his own guilt and anger, even what he admitted last spring became a resentment of the game that led to an unfulfilled trade request.
“I’m building towards what I can be out there,” Boeser told us in November. “I think I’m just starting to figure it out.”
Saturday he became a 30-goal scorer, although Boeser’s all-around game has raised his ceiling far beyond that simplistic threshold. Next week, after a few days off in Florida, he’ll be one of five Canuck players joining coach Rick Tocchet at the All-Star Game in Toronto.
He scored 18 goals all of last season.
“I don’t know if it’s hit me yet,” Boeser told reporters late Saturday. “I think more so just that we won that game; I think that’s really exciting for me right now — the fact that we came back from 4-1. We still had the mindset after the second period that, you know, if we get one on the power play, we can go from there and come back.”
Pettersson scored at 1:11 of the final period when Columbus goalie Elvis Merzlinkins stumbled and the Blue Jackets began to collapse. Boeser tipped in Quinn Hughes’ point shot at 3:24, before scoring about the easiest goal he has had this season at 6:28.
After getting nothing out of a first period when shots were 11-4 and scoring chances 13-3 for the Canucks, Vancouver surrendered four goals in the second, including a couple on giveaways by Pettersson and J.T. Miller. And yet, with the Canucks starting the third period on a power play, Boeser said everyone believed they could still win the game.
It helps that they had won 32 of them already, 30 of them in regulation time, and were 16-2-4 the previous eight weeks.
“I think we all felt that in the locker room,” Boeser said. “I think just having that mindset of going out there and really trying to get a goal on the power play, which we did, really kind of got the guys into it and gave us a little momentum there. Next thing you know, we draw another couple of penalties and make it count. I think it’s just big for our team that we have that belief.”
First-year Canuck defenceman Ian Cole, the two-time Stanley Cup winner who has been to the playoffs nine straight seasons with six different teams, said the feeling he has now in Vancouver is a familiar one.
“Being able to win games different ways,” he explained. “You find yourself, you know, in different situations in every game, right? Ideally, everything’s perfect all the time, but it’s never going to be, so you need to have a little bit — certainly resiliency — but you need to be able to kind of roll with the punches and kind of figure out the game as it transpires.
“Being able to. . . move forward and win the hockey game shows the level of resiliency that you need. And our level of confidence and maturity, being able to say (when it was 4-1), ‘It doesn’t really matter how we got here, we need to win the game, and this is what we have to do to win it,’ I think that mentality is very beneficial to play for a while into the spring and summer.”
On the winning goal, Boeser came off the bench and on to the puck, walked around leaden Blue Jacket Kent Johnson, then banked a goalmouth pass off Pettersson’s skate with 58.7 seconds remaining at three-on-three.
The second most important five-minute chunk for the Canucks began with 8:05 remaining in regulation time when referees Corey Syvret and Michael Markovic seemed to bend review-protocol guidelines to make the correct call on Vancouver defenceman Tyler Myers: a major penalty and game misconduct for elbowing, albeit inadvertently, Sean Kuraly in the face.
It led to Canuck penalty killing’s finest moment. A shorthanded unit that for much of last season was on pace to be the worst in NHL history, allowed just two shots while killing the five-minute disadvantage to get to overtime.
“Better sticks,” penalty-killer Pius Suter explained of the shorthanded unit’s massive uptick the last two months. “Today in that five minutes, I think we kind of denied them the entries. They never really got set up much. It’s just kind of good sticks and being connected. When one guy goes, all other guys are ready to jump. It’s not just one guy working on his own. Just kind of keep your head down and keep playing. Make sure you don’t get overhyped, don’t overstay shifts or do anything crazy. Just kind of keep it simple, and I think that’s what we did.”
“I guess it shows character that we can come back and we just keep going,” Pettersson said. “We got the goal and we got some momentum, got another power play and we scored again. Everybody was just into it. The fans gave us good energy. It shows what we can do when everybody’s feeding off each other.”
