Mark Spector

Mark Spector is a columnist for sportsnet.ca

VANCOUVER -- Well, the choices are pretty clear.

The Vancouver Canucks can spend the next 24 hours crying about the officiating in their Game 2, overtime loss. Or they can spend it figuring out how to be a better hockey team than the Los Angeles Kings, a team full of young, up-and-coming studs like Wayne Simmonds, Anze Kopitar and Drew Doughty, the best 20-year-old defenceman Canadians have seen since one Robert Gordon Orr.

We know what the players will do. They won't be looking back for long.

Their fans, however? That group got some meat to chew on when head coach Alain Vigneault hotly disputed the too-many-men-on-the-ice call assessed to Vancouver in overtime, providing the power play on which Kopitar scored the game winner.

"I'd like to take credit for how the play went," said L.A.'s savvy defenceman Rob Scuderi, the glue on a Pittsburgh Penguins blue-line that played in the last two Stanley Cup finals. "But I just saw seven or eight guys over by their bench, and I just thought, 'What the hell?'

"I think if the winger hadn't touched the puck they might have gotten away with it. But he touched it. That was a call (the officials) couldn't screw up."

Not so fast, Rob. Predictably, that is exactly what Vigneault charged the zebras with doing.

"It was the wrong call," the coach said with conviction after the game. "You're allowed five feet (from the boards, to make a line change). The rule is, the player coming on the ice can't touch the puck. It touched one of our players - Kevin Bieksa was coming off the ice because he was cut.

"You've got two guys wearing red arm bands out there. They're supposed to make the call - not the linesman."

Yes, sports fans, this is officially a playoff series.

Like every other NHL Round 1 series - except in Chicago, where Game 2 goes tonight - L.A.-Vancouver is tied 1-1 and shifting towns.

Games 1 and 2 were identical: Both teams blew regulation leads; both teams nearly lost in overtime before eventually winning a game they truly deserved, based on shots and territorial play; and both games ended with identical 3-2 scores, on Mikael Samuelsson's laser beam in Game 1, and Anze Kopitar's pinball in Game 2.

"I saw the replay," Kopitar said after the game. "(Luongo) made the save, he was reaching back, it hit his knob and went in."

The knob of Luongo's stick, of course.

It was delicious irony, when you consider that it was the knob of his stick that got caught up in Luongo's gear on that circus stop in Game 1 overtime, causing him to have to flail around and clear the puck off the line with his catching glove.

Two nights later, that ball of tape was a culprit one more.

Alas, the knob giveth, and the knob taketh away.

Just the way many of these same people cheered the Kings prodigal defenceman Doughty in February when he was starring for Canada's Olympic team. Not so much now, as Doughty took a huge bite out of this series in Game 2, playing a career-high 32:56.

"We've got the crowd against us now," he said. "When you score a goal in overtime, and you don't hear a holler or a cheer, it's kind of funny."

Yeah. Hilarious.

Doughty played 28:33 of regulation, and way more than half of overtime. The kid was absolutely fantastic, stealing the show on a rare night when the Sedin brothers did not register a point.

"He should play that much," said his coach, Terry Simpson. "When I looked at the time sheet at the end of the first game, he was at 24 minutes. We have a premier young player. I believe he should play close to 30 minutes a night. That's what premier players play."

This was the seventh consecutive overtime game for L.A., dating back to the regular season. But they came on in this one, erasing an early 2-0 deficit, and earning full points for this win.

Newsflash: We've got a series here now, folks.

L.A. got their split, the Canucks know they've got to raise their level, and at least one team is cheesed off at the officiating.

Must be playoff time.