The Vancouver Canucks dropped a point on Saturday vs. the Seattle Kraken. Hopefully it doesn’t hurt them in the final accounting at the end of the season.
Two weeks ago, we wrote in this space that the Canucks were slowly inching forward.
They weren’t playing great, but they were making progress nonetheless. They were winning much more than they were losing.
But the current state of affairs is very worrying. They are now -1 in goals for vs. against. They’re a very mediocre 3-3-4 in their last 10 games.
The trend here is no longer slightly forward. It’s treading water.
At best.
The Canucks’ head coach said “execution” seven times on Saturday.
His team lost because they lost their composure and they stopped doing things. They gave away “the guts of the ice” as he likes to call it.
But then the reality of what this team is without their best player is set in.
There are only two Canucks defencemen this season who have a positive goal share when they’re on the ice: Hughes and his partner, Hronek.
This is a result-focused business and that’s a pretty terrible truth.
“Devastating,” Jake DeBrusk acknowledged.
A point dropped
The Canucks are still in a playoff spot and the only team behind them with a realistic chance of catch them is Calgary, who have a -7 goal differential, a fair statement on where the Flames are actually at. So the Canucks do have some room to work with. But, given they’ve dropped three overtime contests in the last five games, two being games where they had control of the game in the third period, you’re not wrong for worrying about where the team is at.
This was a point dropped. Brutally. There’s just no getting around that. And at the end of the season, a single point could matter.
“These ones hurt,” Tocchet said flatly.
Not a bad bounce
Tocchet said, “Nah.”
“Gotta box out Sprong. And if not, you’ve got to get out of the blue,” he said.
Eight of Juulsen’s worst 10 shot-attempts games have come since Nov. 26; that’s since Hronek left the lineup with his shoulder injury.
No team can truly survive losing their best two defencemen, but you can tape things together for a spell if you’ve got some depth.
But the chasm between the Canucks top two and the others is so vast and we’re seeing it in stark relief right now.
Management do want to add a defenceman. Why they need to has never been so clear. That Hughes is apparently returning to the lineup soon is great news and probably lessens the pressure on GM Patrik Allvin to make a deal — but at the same time, the long run, with the new defenceman, also can’t come soon enough. That is so, so clear.