OTTAWA – The best two things about the Vancouver Canucks on Thursday were the points they collected for beating the Ottawa Senators 5-2.
Whatever was next best was a distant third.
Actually, the Canucks defended efficiently, limiting prime scoring chances during stretches when the Senators controlled play. But Vancouver managed only 16 shots, and were stuck at 10 six minutes into the third period.
Vancouver’s forecheck failed to cause its usual havoc, and the Canucks were certainly the second-fastest team for most of the night.
And yet, they won.
And they won going away, scoring three times in the final 22 minutes to extend the team’s points streak to nine games (8-0-1). This kind of a result, let alone the confidence and accountability players displayed afterward, would have been unthinkable here a year ago when the Canucks were crashing and about to turn into a fireball.
Until the last four weeks, this was a game the Canucks would probably not have won. But when you’ve already won nine of your first 12, winning No. 10 becomes a little easier – at least mentally.
“I would not call that a good road game,” defenceman Ian Cole said. “Was it good that we won? Yeah, absolutely. Like, that’s great. That’s what you get judged by in this league. That being said, I think that everyone in here knows that that was not our best game. The details weren’t there, the energy wasn’t there. It just seemed like we were just lacking a little bit.
“But we didn’t give up a ton, we found a way to get goals, and we ended up shutting them down in the end when they made a push. There were aspects that were good. But it just wasn’t up to our standard. We need to be mature enough to realize that and fix it.”
It’s a wonderful luxury for Canuck players to be able to critique a win, and encouraging that they universally realized Thursday that their effort was worthy of criticism.
That kind of awareness is another indication of how much the team has transformed in a short period of time under coach Rick Tocchet.
“For me, it’s a little bit easier because when I go in (to the dressing room) between periods, my temperament, I know those guys know that we didn’t play (well),” Tocchet told reporters. “I don’t have to get mad. Like, they know. Maybe in the past, I would have been a little bit more heated. But I’m comfortable with the leadership group and (how) they’re handling the resiliency, which is a good thing. But we’ve got to be careful. We’ve got to make sure we play a 60-minute game because … where our record is, teams want to beat us now. It’s a different standard a little bit, right? It’s only, what 13 or 14 games in? But teams are going to be ready for us and we’ve got to make sure we match that desperation.”
Off to the best start in franchise history at 10-2-1, the Canucks visit the hockey Meccas of Toronto and Montreal for back-to-back games against the Maple Leafs and Canadiens, starting Saturday on Hockey Night in Canada.
This trip to a couple of the National Hockey League’s biggest, most storied markets has the potential to be a kind of unveiling for the rebranded Canucks.
But all they proved in Ottawa is that they can win. They need to play better, and certainly skate better, if they want to beat the Leafs, although so far that hasn’t been nearly the daunting challenge for opponents that it was supposed to be.
“They’re not all Picassos,” Canuck J.T. Miller said, “and this was not one by any means. It’s one of the things you’ve got to learn from. We know what our identity and standards are as a team; we’re trying to form that. And over the last 10 or 12 games, we’ve learned about what that should be. We know that it’s got to be better than tonight. We’re going to learn from the bad and watch the good, too, but we know we’ve got to be better going into the next couple of games.
“I mean, it wasn’t an awful game. But there were spurts of the game when they were controlling the play. I don’t think we were skating as well as we normally do tonight. They did a good job of breaking pucks out against us and we normally create a lot more stalls on the forecheck. I think that was basically the whole game, really. I actually think we defended pretty well.”
Actually, they did. Although shots finished 30-16 for the Senators, high-danger chances were 9-3 for Vancouver. The Canucks’ newly-installed structure and confidence withstood the Senators’ zone pressure and shot volume.
The Canucks didn’t chase, didn’t take penalties, didn’t lose discipline despite not having the puck as often as they wanted.
And after they lost a 2-0 lead – Brock Boeser and Ilya Mikeheyev, after a terrible turnover by Senator Tim Stutzle, scored on Vancouver’s first two shots – the Canucks elevated in the second half of the game and produced the deciding goals.
Miller scored on a bar-down rocket at 18:08 of the second period to cap a three-on-two rush, Elias Pettersson bounced a shot in off Mikheyev at 9:23 of the third, and Pettersson blasted them ahead 5-2 at 13:28 – an implausible two seconds into a power play that started with Miller’s clean faceoff win.
Pettersson’s goal and two assists allowed him to retake the NHL scoring lead.
Canuck goalie Casey DeSmith, who is getting two of the three starts on this trip after not playing for 12 days, finished with 28 saves and is now 3-0-1 since his September trade from Montreal.
“I think it depends how you look at it,” winger Phil Di Giuseppe, who teed up the goals for Boeser and Miller, said when asked if there was more good than bad in the game for Vancouver. “Obviously, we won and that’s the main objective. But we know that if we play like that more often than not, we’re not going to get the results. So I think it was a good teaching tool for us – that if we don’t have our best, we can still pull it together.”
“After such bad starts … the last couple years, you feel like you’ve got to play catch-up and you start doing out-of-character things and start forming bad habits,” Miller said. “It’s definitely nice to come out and have the record we do. I think we can take a deep breath and not feel like we need to hit a home run on every play to win every game.”
Sometimes, all it takes are a couple of singles and a sacrifice fly.
