Canucks put forth another woeful effort on home ice

VANCOUVER — The first full day of spring bloomed brilliantly on the West Coast.

The atmospheric river that drenched most of B.C. this week had poured itself out, and although the record-breaking high temperatures of Friday had cooled, it was sunny and 11 degrees in Metro Vancouver on Saturday.

The False Creek seawall near Rogers Arena was packed with people, and both golf courses and the ski hills on the North Shore were busy. You could pick daffodils from your garden or even fire up the lawnmower if ambitious, and the area’s countless thousands of ornamental cherry trees are either already exploding with colour or getting there.

The audacious arrival of spring, as comforting as it is extravagant, almost made the hockey game inside the arena not matter. Almost.

But hockey always matters to some degree in Canada, and so do the Canucks, even during a rebuild as depressing as winter, because there are still 18,000 people paying money to come indoors on a beautiful day in search of some hope and entertainment from the home team.

And through 39 minutes of Saturday’s 3-1 loss to the St. Louis Blues, the Canucks had generated seven shots on net.

Until Vancouver copiously forced three saves from Jordan Binnington in the final minute of the middle period, the Canucks had produced just three shots on target over the previous 30 minutes — equivalent to half a game.

“For sure, we owe a lot to the fans,” winger Drew O’Connor said. “I mean, we want to do well on home ice. It's important for us. You know, it doesn't feel good for us when we go out there and don't play well and disappoint the fans. It's not a good feeling for us (and) definitely not something we're trying to do. We definitely owe it to them to bring 100 per cent effort every night. And if that's not the case, then it needs to be. So there's really no excuse.”

The Canucks’ third-period push was good. When Filip Hronek scored on a Vancouver power play at 8:32, the puck deflecting past Binnington from St. Louis defenceman Logan Mailloux, the Canucks were suddenly back in a game in which they had generated almost nothing.

But they can’t play the first 39 minutes like they did Saturday — or like they did in Thursday’s 6-2 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning in which the Canucks also had just 10 shots through two periods — and expect their arena to remain full during this rebuild.

A market starved for success and, often in the last dozen years, a clearly articulated plan from management, has fully embraced the idea of rebuilding. Hope is embodied in the talented young players the team is accumulating, but the Canucks need more than that in the short term.

They have won eight of 36 home games this season.

“I think we’ve got to play more physical, play harder,” rookie winger Liam Ohgren said of Saturday’s mid-game hibernation. “I think we’re just too much, like, turning and not going through bodies. We need to be more physical and go to the net, put pucks to the net and be strong.”

With the Canucks hopelessly in last place, 13 points adrift of the NHL’s next worst team and with just five wins in 2026, Ohgren said he doesn’t believe players are surrendering.

“I don't think that's the case,” he said. “We had a great practice yesterday, and I think that's how we’ve got to play in games, too. There's no problem with the energy or the fight in the group. So I don't know what it is exactly, but we’ve got to step that up. (The fans) are here every night, so it’s tough for us because we don't want to let them down. We want to play for them. They cheer for us every night, and we want to win games for them. So yeah, it's tough.”

Even with more determination and offensive-zone time in the final period, the Canucks still generated only five shots on net. Binnington finished with 14 saves. Vancouver goalie Kevin Lankinen faced 20 shots and was not in net when Jordan Kyrou secured the win for St. Louis with 48 seconds to go.

The Blues, on an improbable 7-1-2 run but still near the bottom of the league, have not exactly been winning by stifling opponents. They had yielded more than 30 shots in four of their previous five games. They’re not Jacques Lemaire's New Jersey Devils, who infamously held the Canucks to a franchise-record-low eight shots during a 2-1 Vancouver loss the week before Christmas in 1996.

A smart-ass writer who used to work for The Vancouver Sun — he looked a lot like me but was half the age — suggested then that fans would have been better entertained had they stayed home to watch needles fall from their Christmas trees.

It wasn’t quite that bad on Saturday. But still not nearly good enough, especially after the Canucks’ dismal loss two nights earlier against a Lightning team that is far better than the Blues.

“We get caught in our end easily, and then we have a hard time stopping the cycle,” Canucks coach Adam Foote explained. “Then once you get out of it, you’ve got to change, and then (they’re) right back down.

“It's hard to generate offence when you're in your end, and then you're having these changes. And the changes were really weak. We didn't dump it out deep enough and push them back in their end to at least get our forecheck going. It’s something we've been working on and addressing. Once we started pushing in the third, it changed. But we have to learn to start on time in these afternoon games.”

“Yeah, it took us way too long to wake up probably,” O’Connor, who had four of the 10 shots Vancouver forwards amassed, told reporters. “The third period was really good. We had a good push, but we can't be a one-period team.”

Not even now.