VANCOUVER — As he talks about last season, Vancouver Canucks goalie Anders Nilsson extends one hand, points to the ground and slowly starts a circle with his finger.
It is unclear if he is imagining a toilet or a sink, but it’s obvious that water is spiralling down a drain.
“It’s not like guys weren’t trying, but we knew,” Nilsson said. “You could see how the season was going. We weren’t coming back. We weren’t close in a lot of games. Guys didn’t give up, but you could tell.”
And that, he said, is why the epic crash of last season was different than the epic crash of the last four weeks for the Canucks. Because this Vancouver team, younger and faster and starting to emerge from its rebuild, believes it can come back from its lost month.
There was a lot of talk around the team this week about positivity, about guarding against resignation, and dealing constructively with the psychological challenge of going 1-10-2.
Coach Travis Green, who said a couple of startling things before Thursday’s game against the Nashville Predators, claimed the Canucks were actually playing better in the latter part of their losing streak than they had when they dashed to a surprising 10-6-1 start.
“We’ve got a lot of young players we’re trying to make better,” Green said after the morning skate. “But you’re also worried about their emotional psyche. We’re trying to … be really honest with them. It would be different if we had a bunch of guys that I didn’t think were playing that well. That would be a different conversation. But quite honestly, we might have played better this last stretch of games than we had when we were winning.
“I know if we keep this up, we’re going to be OK. We’re going to find a win and then all of a sudden it will start to turn if we keep playing that way.”
As if to make their coach look smart, the Canucks then dumped the powerful Predators 5-3 at Rogers Arena — they led 2-0 and 5-1 — in their best game since Nov. 8 to launch themselves into a three-game road trip that starts Sunday.
Will the Canucks recover from their nose dive the last four weeks or just swirl down the drain like they did last winter, when they went 2-11-2 amid a crush of injuries between Dec. 7 and Jan. 9?
We’ll see how they do next week in St. Louis, Columbus and Nashville. But inside the dressing room, Nilsson said the feeling is entirely different than a year ago, when three guys driving the attack were soon-to-be-retired 37-year-olds Daniel and Henrik Sedin and soon-to-be-traded Thomas Vanek, who was 34.
“I think the spirit is higher this year because even when we’ve been losing, we’re close,” Nilsson said. “We’ve been playing good hockey. And everyone wants to turn this around. No one is giving up or waiting for next season. I feel that vibe and energy in here coming to the rink every day.
“I think it’s that, in the organization, we have some really good potential on this team, and in the years ahead guys are just going to get better and better. In the locker room, you’re more in the present moment. You’re not thinking: ‘Next year we’re going to be better.’ It’s more about doing a good job today because if you don’t do a good job today, you’re not going to get next year.”
The Canucks have been far more competitive the last month than when they collapsed last winter.
Of their 10 regulation losses, six were by one goal. In their 11 regulation losses during last year’s streak, they were within a goal only once at the end of a game. Six other defeats were by at least three goals, and the average margin of loss in the 11 games was 3.18. The Canucks were not close.
“It was kind of difficult last year because it was the end of an era (for the Sedins and the organization),” defenceman Eric Gudbranson said. “Maybe you were working towards the inevitable.
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“We set the standard (for this season) with our start. We set the bar pretty high and that’s how we compare ourselves. That’s the template that we look at as far as what we expect of ourselves. You can take a large-number amount of minutes almost every game and say we won those minutes. But in a smaller amount of minutes, we lost the game. That’s kind of what we’ve been dealing with.”
Rookie-of-the-year candidate Elias Pettersson, 20, who has 25 points in his first 25 NHL games, makes a huge difference to the Canucks compared to last season. So does a healthy Bo Horvat, who has 27 points in 30 games and has reached yet another level.
Wingers Jake Virtanen and Nikolay Goldobin are having breakthrough seasons. So is defenceman Ben Hutton, who is the oldest of these players at age 25. Against the Predators, the average age of forwards on Green’s top two lines was 22.3.
“I was out (injured) during that time last year, but I feel like the guys are a little more positive,” Horvat said. “We know that we’re playing really good hockey for 50 or 55 minutes. The frustrating part is knowing you’re playing well enough to win but not getting results.”
“I’m really hopeful,” veteran centre Jay Beagle said. “We’re a young team that had success at the beginning. We have to continue to push and continue to build and get better.”
