CORAL SPRINGS, Fla. – For the first time since he was a teenage rookie with the Arizona Coyotes, Oliver Ekman-Larsson was well enough to play a National Hockey League game on Thursday and didn’t.
Instead, he did a gym workout during the first period, then showered and changed, waited for the ponderously slow freight elevator at Amalie Arena — the Earth’s tectonic plates move faster — and went up to the press box with teammates Sheldon Dries and Kyle Burroughs to watch the rest of the Vancouver Canucks’ 5-4 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning.
After 888 NHL games, Ekman-Larsson was healthy-scratched by coach Bruce Boudreau, who needed to make a point about accountability and defending and chose the 31-year-old defenceman to do it.
Ekman-Larsson will play Game 889 of his career Saturday night against the Florida Panthers.
The difference back in Phoenix when he was last scratched, in the 2010-11 season, was nobody there much cared about a rookie hockey player going into or out of any lineup.
But in Vancouver, it was as if those tectonic plates shifted against one another to create an earthquake Thursday night because Ekman-Larsson’s healthy scratch came with exactly 4½ years remaining on a contract that costs the Canucks an annual salary-cap charge of $7.26 million.
“Yeah, I mean, it was different, right?” the Swede told Sportsnet after Friday’s practice at the Panthers’ training facility. “It makes you think a lot about your game and yourself as a person. End of the day, my family still loves me, I still have my friends. I’ve just got to be better and work harder.”
Part of a spirited practice amid another losing streak and the usual Canucks chaos, Ekman-Larsson became so furious at one point that he took four full swings at the glass with his stick.
That overt display of emotion was probably about a lot more than one drill gone wrong.
“I’m a guy that cares a lot,” he said. “I’m trying to take a lot of pride in what I do on the ice — defend or whatever. But obviously, when you struggle … sometimes you need this to pull up a little bit and kind of reset and retool a little bit. But I would be lying if I said it didn’t hurt my confidence, letting in all those goals.”
Ekman-Larsson was referring to his minus-14, the archaic statistic that most NHL players still track. In modern terms, the Canucks have been outscored 41-30 at five-on-five with him on the ice.
As a defence pairing, he and Tyler Myers were outscored 5-1 at even strength the previous two games.
“It would be nice to be a little bit better on plus/minus,” he said. “Sometimes it’s your fault and sometimes it’s not your fault but you’re on the ice (for goals against). Overall, I feel like I’ve got to be better. A shutdown guy with a lot of minuses, it’s not good.”
Neither are the optics and implications of the Canucks scratching their highest-paid player with a ton of term left on a contract the team’s previous regime absorbed in a blockbuster trade with the Coyotes just 19 months ago.
“A player being a healthy scratch one time is not a time for concern, but it could be over time if it happens over and over,” Canucks president Jim Rutherford said Friday evening. “The only way that you can really make players accountable now is to sit them out a period or miss a couple of shifts, or even get to the point that you sit them out a game or two. A lot of times it can be a good thing. It’s a reality check.
“Do you like to see it happen to a veteran that’s played that long? No, that’s hard. But I support what the coach did because the coach felt that that was the right thing to do to make that player accountable. And now we’ll see going forward how he responds to it.”
Boudreau wouldn’t confirm after Friday’s practice his lineup for Saturday night, but said it’s very likely that Ekman-Larsson will play against the Panthers.
Another left-side defenceman, Travis Dermott, left the game in Tampa with what’s believed to be a recurrence of symptoms related to the concussion he suffered at training camp.
“These are hard-thought things,” Boudreau said of scratching a 13-year veteran. “We don’t do them willy-nilly. I care about the players an awful lot. So, I mean, when I’m doing that, there’s an awful lot of thought that goes into it.”
Ekman-Larsson said over the course of Thursday, every teammate came to him with words of support and encouragement.
“I was mad and frustrated, obviously, because I want to play,” he said. “If you’re happy about not playing, you should probably not be in the league. I was a little bit grumpy and mad and, obviously, I want to do better, too.
“But great support from my teammates, family, everybody. That’s the most important thing. When you battle and you spend so much time together, you know that they’re going to have your back.
“I try to work hard in the gym every single day and I try to work hard on the ice every single day. And if Brucey felt we had a better chance to win without me (on Thursday), I’m going to support that decision and support my teammates. But just make sure that I’m ready for the next one.”
. . .
The day after Conor Garland was rocked by a dangerous sucker punch from Tampa defenceman Mikhail Sergachev, the Canuck winger said he provoked the incident by slashing Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy and accepts that repercussions come with playing hard around the opposition net.
“I’ve played in that area for my whole career, in front of the net, and that’s just stuff that kind of happens,” Garland said. “I think Vasilevskiy is probably the best goalie in the world. I whacked him because I thought the puck was loose for a second and then he swallowed it up. I whacked him and they’ve got to defend their goalie, so I had no problem with it. He actually came and talked to me after, Sergachev. He felt bad about it. But I said if it happens next game if I whack their goalie, I wouldn’t expect anything different.
“I’ve played like a rat since I was 16, so I’m used to it.”
The NHL fined Sergachev $5,000 on Friday for his unpenalized punch, while personal-injury lawyers everywhere wept.
