It starts with a turnover, leading to a quality chance, which an embattled goaltender turns aside.
Five players, four of them under the age of 22, turn the puck up ice. They’re sure they have the advantage. Down a goal early in the third period, all five Vancouver Canucks jump into the play.
Youthful exuberance is a double-edged sword in the NHL. It’s the toughest hockey league in the world, and the distance between an odd-man rush one way or the other is often as small as an inch or two.
In this case, an advantageous situation quickly turns sour. There’s a poor decision, a lost puck in the skates. A veteran stay-at-home defender in the place you’d least expect, bent over like a long-snapper in the neutral zone, catches a sliver of puck with his skate.
The puck wobbles and is lost, pounced on by two veteran NHL forwards, who take their time to savour a rare two-on-zero. This particular play ends predictably: a flailing goaltender with no realistic shot at a save, reaches hopelessly back with his paddle, watching as the puck goes over the line.
These are the mistakes you resolve to live with if you’re the Vancouver Canucks. Well, sort of.
“I don’t think you’ve got to live with it,” Canucks head coach Willie Desjardins said of the play on Saturday. His Canucks lost 4-2 to the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Still, Desjardins let his young players play through the mistakes. Earlier in the season, he may have been more hesitant.
“It’s a long trip, we have to play everybody,” Desjardins explained.
“It was just a play that went against them,” he later added, “but it’s a play that could go against a veteran as well.”
For years, Vancouver has been one of the league’s oldest teams. This season, they have five players age-22 or younger on the roster.
Vancouver’s youth movement has generated headlines, excitement and renewed interest in a market that’s been starved for young stars. And for the most part, Bo Horvat, Jake Virtanen, Ben Hutton and Jared McCann have been helpful contributors.
There will be moments like this, though. A costly giveaway leading to the game-winning goal on the biggest stage in hockey in a close game against the under-skilled, but exceedingly well-coached Toronto Maple Leafs.
Sometimes that will be the price of developing young talent in an NHL environment, something the Canucks are committed to doing.
“I thought we had them out-numbered, with all their forwards in behind us,” Canucks defenceman Hutton said, a talented 22-year-old whose ability to jump into the play has permitted him to earn an NHL job ahead of schedule, even if it cost him on Saturday.
“[Leafs defenseman Roman] Polak made an uncharacteristic jump up, because it could’ve been a five-on-one. But it worked it out for him. I was up on the play, my partner was up on the play, so they had a 2-on-0.
“I tried to get back, but I tripped,” Hutton continued, his description of the play beginning to require Benny Hill’s Yakety Sax as accompaniment.
“A series of unfortunate events. We’ve got to be smarter, got to talk.”
This one play didn’t, by itself, cost Vancouver the game. Saturday’s loss in Toronto was a bit of a wild one – 85 total shots, some odd penalty calls, and multiple disallowed Vancouver goals.
“It’s a tough goal, but you’ve got to find a way,” Desjardins said of the backbreaking early third-period marker. “We still had time.”
This signature sequence did, however, serve to highlight a fascinating contrast between how the Canucks and the Maple Leafs are approaching the act of restocking their respective organizations with younger players.
Where the Canucks are more credibly competing for a playoff spot this season, they’re doing so while rolling with a bevy of young skaters. The Maple Leafs, meanwhile, are in the midst of a more traditional type of rebuilding phase but they have only one player aged 22 or younger on the roster: Morgan Rielly, who is a third-year pro.
This past summer, the Canucks shed veteran skaters in part to allow their young assets a fighting chance at stealing a job. The Maple Leafs did the opposite, signing seemingly every bargain-bin veteran they could to a one-year contract.
So while McCann and Hutton and Virtanen were stealing roster spots from veteran players in Vancouver this September, Toronto unceremoniously reassigned all of Mitch Marner, William Nylander and Kasperi Kapanen to the American League or junior. It wasn’t much of a surprise; the deck was stacked against Toronto’s top, young players.
It’s deliciously appropriate then that Shawn Matthias was the Maple Leafs skater who capitalized on the rookie mistakes of Vancouver’s youthful quartet, scoring the game winner. A Canuck last season, the club allowed Matthias to walk as an unrestricted free agent in part because they believed they had younger, cheaper options in-house who might replace his offensive production.
The Maple Leafs signed Matthias to a one-year deal in early July for the opposite reason. Toronto brought in the big, Mississauga-born forward to score 5-on-5 goals and to help the organization deny a gift-wrapped roster spot to one of their prospects.
When asked if he felt a sense of satisfaction scoring against his former mates, Matthias gave a concise response.
“Absolutely,” he said to laughs in the home-side dressing room.
No matter what you’re told about Chicago and Los Angeles, there’s probably no one, true path to building a contender in the NHL. Toronto’s or Vancouver’s wildly divergent approach to roster construction may become a model other teams look to emulate, or a cautionary tale to be avoided. Time will tell.
On Saturday night, the veteran, should-be rebuilding Maple Leafs took two points from Vancouver’s group of intent-on-competing for a playoff spot kids. It’s more than a little bit ironic that, in terms of the longer-term interests of the respective clubs, it was arguably a minor setback for both sides.
