The Vegas Golden Knights’ goaltending story is a great one. Except for the teams that lose to them, like the Vancouver Canucks did Thursday.
Maxime Lagace, the fourth-string goalie forced into the National Hockey League by the injury crisis in the crease in Las Vegas, played his ninth straight game and had his easiest night yet in a 5-2 victory for the Golden Knights.
The Canucks managed only 21 shots against the undrafted 24-year-old who divided the last three seasons between the American League and East Coast League and whose NHL numbers before Thursday were a 4.13 goals-against average and .860 save rate.
Those aren’t the numbers of an NHL goalie and Lagace, even in victory, didn’t really look like one. He was scrambling all around his goal area and leaving shrapnel on the ice after every save. But he had to make only 19 of them.
Lagace had allowed three or more goals in six of his first eight games for Vegas and two nights earlier was ventilated by the Edmonton Oilers, who put seven pucks past him on only 29 shots.
[snippet id=3636897]
After another poor start and another two-goal deficit, the Canucks had pulled even against Lagace and the Knights by the end of the second period. So the game was sitting right there in the third for Vancouver, home from a four-game road trip and eager (we thought) to build on the momentum from Tuesday’s impressive 3-2 win in Los Angeles against the powerful Kings.
And then the Canucks managed just five shots in the final 20 minutes and surrendered three easy goals, including an empty-netter as the expansion Knights improved to 11-6-1. Lagace may not be an NHL goalie, but he sure as heck has an NHL team in front of him.
The Canucks made it easy on both Lagace and the Knights with their weak play at both ends of the ice. Vancouver’s 21 shots were just one above their season-low. They needed to generate more of them against Lagace.
“For sure,” Canucks captain Henrik Sedin said. “But you can’t just go out there thinking you’re going to put pucks at the net. There’s a lot of things that need to happen before you get good shots. We didn’t have execution, we didn’t make the right play. And if you don’t do that, you can talk about getting shots but it’s too tough a league to just get pucks on net.”
The Canucks had neither execution nor the right plays in their own zone either, as a team that led the NHL in even-strength defending had astonishing individual breakdowns on the Golden Knights’ goals.
Veteran Daniel Sedin made a weak fly-by as David Perron toe-dragged the puck around him and made it 1-0 at 3:22 of the first. Alexander Edler was asleep or, at least, day dreaming at the top of the crease when William Karlsson stood untouched behind him to double the lead at 13:00.
Erik Gudbranson lost the puck behind his net to James Neal before Erik Haula scored the winner for Vegas at 6:27 of the third, and Derrick Pouliot mishandled the puck in the high slot before Jonathan Marchessault made it 4-2 with a weak backhander though Jacob Markstrom’s pads at 16:55.
The Canucks looked nothing like the team that beat the Kings and badly outplayed the San Jose Sharks in California. It might have been Vancouver’s poorest game of the season, although they were pretty awful one week earlier in a 4-1 loss to the Anaheim Ducks.
“We didn’t get off to the start we wanted,” Canuck Derek Dorsett said. “It’s hard in this league to chase from behind and we’ve been doing it too often. You’re going to run out of energy when you’re always chasing. We’ve got to find a way to get better starts. Part of our game plan was to get pucks to the net, and we didn’t get enough.”
So was the Canucks’ lack of mental sharpness due to travel fatigue, playing for the fifth straight game after a flight?
“To be honest, there’s really no excuses,” Dorsett said. “We took the day off yesterday to rest and we had an optional skate this morning. So guys should be energized and ready to play.”
“They just came out hard and we didn’t,” Edler said. “We talk every day that we need everyone to be good and contribute because that’s how we’re going to win games. I wasn’t good enough today. I’ve got to make sure I’m better next game.”
As surprising as the Golden Knights have been, “next game” for the Canucks will be much tougher. On Saturday, they play the 14-5-1 St. Louis Blues, who dusted the Oilers 4-1 on Thursday. Then the Canucks repack their large suitcases – if they unpacked them at all – and travel to the East Coast to open another six-game road trip Tuesday against the Philadelphia Flyers, which precedes a game the next night against the Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins.
You can see how it would have been prudent to collect a couple of points against the expansion team and its fourth-string goalie.
Other than a second-period surge that generated goals by Brock Boeser and Bo Horvat, the Canucks just had nothing against the Golden Knights.
This is where the 9-8-2 Canucks are in their rebuild: good one game, poor the next, somewhere in the middle of a league that is so evenly competitive that an expansion team can run through four goalies and still amass 11 wins by the middle of November.
[relatedlinks]