At the end of their longest road trip in six years, the Vancouver Canucks ran out of gas two periods too soon.
The team atop the National Hockey League standings lost three one-goal leads before losing 4-3 in a shootout to the Columbus Blue Jackets on Monday afternoon.
Maybe it was the seven-game excursion over 13 days. Maybe it was the planes-trains-and-automobiles ordeal (no trains, but two border crossings) to escape a snowstorm and make it to Ohio a day later than expected for a matinee game. Maybe it was mental fatigue. Maybe it was the Blue Jackets.
But the Canucks were outshot 36-16 over the final 45 minutes and lost for the first time since the road-trip opener a long time ago when Blue Jacket Kirill Marchenko scored the only goal of the four-round shootout.
Dead on their skates, the Canucks hung on to add one more point after a five-game road winning streak that gave them 11 of 14 points during their seven-game odyssey – the franchise’s most successful marathon since 2011.
By any measure, it was a fantastic road trip as the Canucks beat a handful of good teams, even if the loss at the end came against a lousy one.
Second-last in the Eastern Conference, the Blue Jackets rallied from deficits of 1-0, 2-1 and 3-2, tying the game for the last time at 10:57 of the third period. Canuck goalie Casey DeSmith was excellent, but Dmitri Voronkov’s tying goal was a stinker, as the Blue Jacket jammed a puck over DeSmith’s skate and through a small hole the goalie left open at the post.
Despite Columbus’ 44-30 advantage in shots, naturalstattrick.com had the high-danger scoring chances 10-10 at even strength, and expected-goals were 53/47 for the Jackets.
J.T. Miller, Conor Garland and Elias Pettersson, with a power-play goal that put Vancouver ahead 3-2 at 7:35 of the second period, scored for the Canucks. Yegor Chinakhov and Voronkov had the other goals for the Blue Jackets. Columbus goalie Elvis Merzlikins made 27 saves, plus four more in the shootout against Andrei Kuzmenko, Miller, Pettersson and Pius Suter.
“Listen, it was a good road trip,” Miller told Canucks TV. “We came together as a team, I thought, won in some really fun environments to play in (against) some hard teams. We just didn’t play well today; there’s not a whole lot to like about it if I’m being honest. That was just kind of a dud for us. I think we know that. We have high expectations that we’ll get back to where we need to be for next game.”
Now 26-0-1 when leading into the third period, the Canucks open a five-game homestand Thursday against the Arizona Coyotes.
SHOOTOUT CHOICES
The Canucks are now 0-for-2 in shootouts, a platform that is the Holy Grail of second-guessing in hockey. Coaches are either geniuses or idiots for their decisions on which shooters get to toss a coin to decide a hockey game.
If the Canucks had won the toss on Monday and won 4-3 in a shootout, we wonder how different the post-game narrative and reaction would have been in Vancouver even with every detail unchanged from the 65 minutes of playing time.
Still, for the record, we agree that Suter, with no goals and one assist on the road trip, was a strange choice by coach Rick Tocchet to go fourth in the shootout after Kuzmenko, Pettersson and Miller had all missed for the second time this season. Garland is 8-for-19 in his career. Brock Boeser, although just 5-for-23 in shootouts, had six shots on Monday and has 27 goals this season. Quinn Hughes has played at an elevated level all season. There are probably a handful of players we would have picked ahead of Suter.
EVERYTHING BUT A TRAIN
After the storm that dumped two feet of snow on Buffalo, where Vancouver won 1-0 on Saturday, the Canucks arrived in Columbus 24 hours late. Their post-game charter Saturday was cancelled and the team spent an extra night in a Buffalo hotel – getting lucky that rooms became available only because the Buffalo Bills’ playoff game was postponed two days.
With prospects bleak for flying out of Buffalo on Sunday, the Canucks bussed to the nearby border, then had to unload and transfer to a Canadian-licenced bus to take them to the airport in Toronto. But to re-cross the border on a charter to Columbus, all the Canucks’ equipment had to be pre-cleared at Scotiabank Arena, where there were U.S Customs officials available because the Detroit Red Wings were to be pre-cleared after visiting the Toronto Maple Leafs.
The Canucks’ charter flight departed Pearson International Airport in the evening, and players arrived at their Columbus hotel around 930 pm Sunday night to get ready for Monday’s 1 pm puck drop.
Sunday was Day 12 on the road for the Canucks.
QUOTEBOOK
Rick Tocchet: “I mean, it’s been a hell of a trip. There’s been a lot thrown at the guys and you can tell (they were) mentally fatigued. But like I said, to grind out a point at this stage of the seventh game, going home, I think it’s just nice to get on that plane and get home. It’s a long trip. Guys to see their families and stuff like that, it’s been a while, it’s been two weeks. So it’s nice to get home and kind of reboot ourselves. Hell of a trip. I’m really proud of the guys and I’ve got to give them a lot of credit… digging hard to even get this point.”
