VANCOUVER – The Vancouver Canucks have won 12 of their first 28 games, and in eight of those victories they scored at least five goals. They’ve won only once with fewer than four goals — and in that victory they scored three times.
They scored none on Saturday against the Minnesota Wild. Of course, the Canucks didn’t win and, naturally, the post-game discussion was about the failure of their offence and especially a power play that surrendered a key shorthanded goal in a 3-0 loss.
Filip Gustavsson had a 35-save shutout for the Wild, which had allowed 19 goals in its previous four games and hadn’t surrendered fewer than three goals in seven straight contests.
It was a matchup when statistics aligned for the Canucks — an opponent whose slack defending and spotty goaltending might have fed Vancouver’s one obvious strength: its offence.
But when that didn’t occur, there was no alternate pathway to victory for the one-dimensional Canucks.
They’ve been able to outscore their defensive problems in a lot of games. But when they can’t, like on Saturday, they have little chance of winning because they have shown themselves through the first third of the National Hockey League season incapable of defending well enough to win a low-scoring game.
If their offence doesn’t generate four goals, there is no Plan B. This is a serious problem for them.
“It's not really sustainable,” captain Bo Horvat said of the way the team has been winning (8-4-0) the last four weeks. “When you're letting in four and having to score five every night, it puts a lot of stress on not only the goaltending but us as forwards, too. We want to win games 3-1, 2-1. They scored another three tonight, so we'd have to get four. It's tough to sustain that on a nightly basis. In this league, it wears on you.”
Horvat said the loss reinforced the Canucks’ need to be “better defensively, not give up so many Grade-A (scoring chances), protect the house a little bit better. I find we let them get too many Grade-A opportunities right in front of our net.”
Vancouver won its previous two games, both in overtime and both after scoring late power-play goals to tie them, 6-5 against the San Jose Sharks and 7-6 against the Montreal Canadiens.
On Saturday, the Wild scored three but easily could have doubled that total. Canuck goalie Spencer Martin, who has benefitted from unsustainable run support this season, was outstanding.
In the seven-minute, second-period sequence that pretty much determined the game, when the Canucks had three straight power plays while trailing 1-0, Martin stuffed a shorthanded breakaway by Minnesota’s Joel Eriksson Ek before getting beaten on a shorthanded breakaway by Conor Dewar that doubled the lead at 16:08.
It was the sixth shorthanded goal allowed by the Canucks this season, although coach Bruce Boudreau pointed out post-game that two of those were with Vancouver’s net empty as his team pressed with an extra attacker while trailing late in games.
“It's individual plays,” Boudreau said. “Guys make plays like tonight; I would think that's not a system play when you make a pass right on the other guy's tape for breakaway. On the shorthanded goals, it's usually a breakaway that ends up given up or a two-on-one. We've been pressing for goals a lot this year and that stuff happens.”
The pass on Dewar’s tape was a cross-ice hope by Canuck J.T. Miller that the penalty-killer anticipated, catching Miller’s teammates going in the wrong direction.
“It was a mistake,” Miller told reporters. “They scored on it. It was obviously not good.”
He added: “I expect myself to be better — not because of the mistake; sh-- happens out there — but just in a general sense, I need to be better for the team and lead by example.”
They all need to be better defensively; 6-5 hockey is fun until you score fewer than three.
The Canucks were forcing Martin to make point-blank saves at the end (Kirill Kaprizov), just like they were at the beginning (Marcus Foligno).
Gustavsson didn’t face that quality of scoring chances until the third period.
Shots in the first period were 14-4 for the Wild, who had lost the night before in Edmonton while the Canucks hadn’t played since Wednesday. But the only goal Martin allowed was eight seconds into Minnesota’s second power play, when Matt Boldy scored on a rebound to make it 1-0 at 16:43.
In the 8-3-0 run which brought the Canucks back to .500 (12-12-3) before Saturday, Vancouver had allowed 40 goals but scored 43. Their advantage on special teams was 11-4.
So on special teams there was a market correction Saturday for the Canucks. But not in defending. They were themselves.
“You would have expected, I think, with three straight (power plays) — and they're using the same guys — that we would have figured it out and scored a goal at that point,” Boudreau said. “But we ended up giving it and that was sort of a backbreaker. You could see the wind really go out of the sails of a lot of players. In the third, I mean, there was an effort. But unless you're willing to go to the front of the net and you're willing to get those loose pucks where all the goals usually come from, you're not going to score and we didn't.
“It's just another. . . opportunity that we didn't take advantage of. I don't know why we came out of the gate slow. I mean, we pushed a lot harder in the second and third but we couldn't get a goal. But we should have been ready to pounce on them.”
The Canucks do not play again until Wednesday in Calgary. Saturday’s loss was the start of a nine-game stretch against Western Conference teams, most of them somewhere close to the Canucks in the standings, that takes Vancouver to the New Year.
“We brought ourselves back to this point (and) it would have been nice to get above .500,” Horvat said. “But we've got to fight to get back there again.”
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