Canucks Takeaways: Edge, urgency not enough to stop Tortorella's Golden Knights

The Vegas Golden Knights’ coaching change fired up the Vancouver Canucks.

With one-time Vancouver coach John Tortorella standing behind the Knights’ bench Monday for the first time since Vegas’ surprise firing of 2023 Stanley Cup winner Bruce Cassidy, the Canucks played with more edge and urgency than they have in most games since the Olympic break.

They still lost their sixth straight, 4-2, but forced the Knights to rally from 1-0 and 2-1 deficits as the Canucks bounced back from a 7-3 loss Saturday to the Calgary Flames.

In his 1,000^th National Hockey League game, Evander Kane opened scoring for Vancouver with a pretty finish from Jake DeBrusk on a two-on-one, and Brock Boeser’s deft second-period deflection again put the visitors ahead.

But Shea Theodore and Reilly Smith scored goals for Vegas 1:17 apart late in the middle frame, and the Knights clinched just their second win in eight games on Cole Smith’s empty-netter with 70 seconds remaining in the third. Coaching his sixth NHL team — and his third since Tortorella’s one-and-done season with the Canucks in 2013-14 — the 67-year-old maintained the Knights’ franchise streak of each coach winning his debut. (They’ve had four).

Especially after the opening period, the Knights elevated their abrasiveness and intensity for their new coach and outshot the Canucks 33-24. Shot attempts, however, were 67-33 and Vancouver goalie Kevin Lankinen had to be outstanding to keep his team within a goal until the 59^th minute.

The second half of the Canuck road trip gets much harder, as Vancouver visits the Colorado Avalanche on Wednesday and Minnesota Wild on Thursday.

QUOTEBOOK

Canucks coach Adam Foote to reporters in Las Vegas: “They were fighting. We knew they were going to come out hard and they were finishing their checks trying to play that hard game, and they did throughout the 60 minutes. And we matched it. We competed. We didn’t back down, that’s for sure.”

DEFENCE SCHOOL

The number of times this season that Foote has mentioned the inexperience of the team’s young defencemen risks creating an impression that Zeev Buium, Tom Willander, Elias Pettersson (Junior) and, lately, Victor Mancini are the main reason the team is heading to its worst finish in franchise history. 

Problems and deficiencies on the Canucks, of course, extend far beyond the academy on the blue line.

That said, all of the young defenceman might have been better suited to more (or some) development time in the American Hockey League, and their learning-as-they-go mistakes at the NHL level have indeed been a factor in team performance.

Pettersson, for instance, knows he can’t go all-in on a challenge and misplay a two-on-one like he did on Shea Theodore’s tying goal. Buium knows he can’t turn over the puck in his own slot, and Willander understands he has to box out in front of the net. These are smart kids.

Monday was just NHL Game Nos. 61 for Willander and 67 for Buium. In his second season, Pettersson is up to 90 games.

NHL growing pains are almost always a necessity for young defencemen, so at least the trio is that much closer to making it past adolescence as pros. And the Canucks, as everyone knows, are uniquely equipped to let them learn on the job.

WHAT WE LIKE

Beyond their skillsets, what is encouraging about Buium, Willander and Pettersson is how willingly they compete and don’t back away from the fight. Two games ago, Buium literally fought, against Brandt Clarke, when he thought a couple of Los Angeles Kings were going too far with their physicality at the end of a 4-0 game.

In Vegas, Pettersson had his gloves off and looked ready to stand up to tough Knights defenceman Jeremy Lauzon, who started a scrum by roughing up Canuck rookie Linus Karlsson in front of the Vancouver bench. Willander also jumped into the fray. 

Pettersson co-led his team with three hits and in the third period took a run at Keegan Kolesar who, like Lauzon, had been trying to run Canucks all game.

Pettersson and Mancini got lit up as a defence pairing, getting outshot 6-0 and outscored 2-0 while generating expected-goals-for of zero per cent. But the appetite for battle of the young Canucks is impressive.

KANE PAIN

The Canucks trade last spring for Kane was among several home-run swings that management whiffed on for this season in an effort to manufacture a bounce-back year good enough to entice Quinn Hughes to stay. They went to Plan B a while ago.

As for Kane, he didn’t (or won’t) score 25 goals for the Canucks, didn’t make the team harder to play against, didn’t help them get to the playoffs and didn’t earn a contract extension with his hometown team. He didn’t even get traded, as 31 other clubs passed on him at the deadline.

But the 34-year-old winger from East Vancouver did get his 1,000^th game in a Canucks uniform, and marked the achievement by scoring against the Golden Knights. In a season of unhappiness for nearly everyone around the team, Kane’s milestone is worth celebrating.

He is only the 26^th British Columbian to log 1,000 NHL games, the 12^th player from Metro Vancouver to do so. And he earned his millennium mark the hard way, playing for five teams and re-establishing his career after the San Jose Sharks terminated his contract in 2021.

With 13 goals and 31 points in 70 games this season, Kane will probably find a sixth NHL team in free agency this summer, albeit on a low-cost, show-me deal. But he will need a better season than this one. We can say that about a lot of Canucks.

GOALIE CHOICES

Lankinen’s improved play the last eight games, an .888 save percentage deflated by a six-goal outing two weeks ago when the Canucks were completely overmatched by the Tampa Bay Lightning, is one of the few bright spots of the team’s latest losing spree. 

With four more years under contract for Lankinen at $4.5-million, and the ongoing uncertainty about Thatcher Demko’s health, the Canucks and Foote have obviously made it a priority to try to get the goalie’s game and confidence rebuilt a little before this season ends. That’s why Lankinen is playing and minor-league callup Nikita Tolopilo is not, although the goalies will split the back-to-back games later this week.

AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’

The best thing about Tortorella’s one season in charge of the Canucks was how well he behaved with the media.

Sure, a team that was still trying to keep itself warm on the dying embers of its Stanley Cup Final run in 2011 underperformed and missed the playoffs in 2013-14 for the first time in six seasons (remember the good old days in Vancouver?). And Tortorella memorably went cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs and tried to storm the Calgary Flames’ dressing room in order to punch Bob Hartley in the face, which he deserved.

At least, Tortorella’s suspension gave Mike Sullivan a chance to run the Canucks’ bench, and that cameo was followed by a job with the Pittsburgh Penguins and a couple of Stanley Cups.

Tortorella was simply the wrong coach at the wrong time for the Canucks.

But with reporters, he was generally accommodating and thoughtful and almost always quotable.

“I thought our best forward was David Booth,” he said after a loss in Detroit. “Which is good for him (but) that's not good for our team.”

Although he never fully articulated it, Tortorella, by then a Cup winner with Tampa Bay, was tired of being seen as a circus sideshow with the media instead of one of the best coaches of his generation.

But YouTube clips last forever, and a dozen years and three teams later, Tortorella is still dealing with the image he created during his infamous and entertaining televised dustups with the late New York Post reporter Larry Brooks and others. 

“Listen, I've made a lot of mistakes along the way,” Tortorella told reporters in Las Vegas before his first game. “I answer questions; I'm going to answer them honestly. I'm not saying I'm the greatest guy in the world after games because you're in the fight with the players, and you guys need us out here, what, 10 minutes after the game, which is insane because we're still amped up. 

“Sometimes emotion gets in the way. It's a good thing, it's a bad thing, right? We all make some mistakes doing it. I'm going to do the best I can for you guys, and I'll never lie to you.”

I was wrong in thinking when Tortorella bombed in Vancouver that the end of his time as an NHL coach was near because the league evolves and eventually people fall behind. But Tortorella, with an Olympic gold medal freshly added to his sock drawer, has kept up and can still coach. That’s why NHL teams keep hiring him.