Canucks Live: Florida crease crash as roller-coaster season continues

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After beating the Lightning on Sunday with a six-goal outburst the Canucks followed it up with five goals on just 15 shots. While it’s easy to pick on goalie Jiri Patera for his seven goals against, before Rat Marchand’s empty netter finished it off, his save percentage .825 was much better than Sergei Brobovsky’s .667, giving up 40 shots versus just getting 15 yourself is a recipe for failure.

And while the Canucks have fought admirably through this tough stretch of top teams, they’re 1-2-2 in their last five. At least the schedule abates now as they come home and have just two games in the next eight days, both at Rogers Arena against the surging Stars on Thursday and the flaccid Flames on Sunday.

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Ben Kuzma had his player grades from the Panthers game and it was a mixed bag though it was nice to see a pair of goals from Elias Pettersson who now has six on the season.

Elias Pettersson (A-)

No hesitation on both goals. Won draw on DeBrusk PP goal, 9-for-28 in circle, three blocks.

Brock Boeser (C)

Put glorious PP rebound chance way over the net. No shots, three blocked, two wide.

But of course the Rat was doing Rat things.

But scoring isn’t Marchand’s only contribution. He also has a unique talent for getting under his opponents’ skin. A few weeks ago, he made headlines for ripping Rasmus Dahlin’s helmet apart while trying to fight him. And last night, he did his best to agitate Canucks captain Quinn Hughes.

Brad Marchand stole Quinn Hughes’ stick
In a video now going viral, Marchand is seen casually stealing Hughes’ stick. Fans can’t stop laughing at Marchand’s antics.
“He’s such a little shit. I love him!” one fan joked.
“At this point the refs are just happy he stopped licking people’s faces,” another wrote.
“Greatest shit-disturber in hockey history,” a third added.

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Sportsnet also highlighted the defensive disasterclass the Canucks put on in the Monday night mayhem.

For the three games, Natural Stat Trick had high-danger scoring chances at five-on-five 51-11 against the Canucks, whose expected-goals were just 24 per cent. Vancouver was outshot 109-50 on the trip.

Yet, against this territorial landslide, the Canucks managed to dig in and score enough times to go 1-1-1 and pass the quarter-mark of their regular season at 9-10-2, two raw points out of a playoff spot in the Western Conference, although considerably farther back on points percentage.

The Canucks have admirably adapted to the daily task of surviving the month-long injury crisis, which currently has six players out, but just alternating wins and losses is slowly but steadily flattening their playoff odds.

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Vancouver has not won consecutive games since Oct. 19, when their lineup crisis accelerated with injuries that same afternoon to centres Filip Chytil and Teddy Blueger. The Canucks are 5-8-2 since then.

If they really want to survive and stay in the race, they’re simply going to have to play better and plug the gaping holes in their defensive game. No team has allowed more goals than the 77 surrendered by the Canucks, whose goals-against average of 3.67 is 30th among 32 teams, and whose 67.1 per cent penalty kill is the worst in hockey.

As Sportsnet analytics correspondent Adam Vingan reported last week, the Canucks’ defensive deterioration can be traced to the front of their net, where the share of shots coming from Vancouver’s slot had plummeted from 11th-best last season to 28th this year, and the team’s defence of slot passes had collapsed to 30th from fifth.

As the Canucks season continues to stutter along in stop-start fashion, and the president goes to the media with declarations that they won’t do a full ‘rebuild’, it just means the rumour mill will continue to churn and with Nashville’s season lurching into irrelevancy Steven Stamkos name is one of the more frequent that keeps coming up.

Check back for more Canucks news throughout the day …

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