Amid one of the franchise’s darkest moments, the Vancouver Canucks have played their way back into the light of the playoff race.
In a season of turmoil and drama unseen on the West Coast since Mike Keenan showed up in the late 1990s with a mandate to blow up the team, the Canucks won their third straight game Wednesday, 3-1 against the Nashville Predators, to re-claim the final wild-card playoff spot in the National Hockey League’s Western Conference.
J.T. Miller or Elias Pettersson could be gone tomorrow, but they’re still playing hard for the Canucks, who are suddenly on their longest winning streak since Nov. 7 and just four points below the Colorado Avalanche and Los Angeles Kings in the playoff ladder.
At 23-17-10, the Canucks have as many points this season as the Tampa Bay Lightning and Boston Bruins, and own the fourth-best road record (14-7-4) in the NHL. All this amid the dysfunction of a dressing room apparently broken by the Miller-Pettersson rift, which Canucks president Jim Rutherford publicly confirmed on Tuesday while adding the organization will trade one or both stars because the team can’t overcome the current divide.
But it won on Wednesday, just as it did Monday in St. Louis (5-2) and Saturday at home against the Washington Capitals (2-1). And while the performance in Nashville was the least impressive of the three for the Canucks, it was probably the best game of the season for goalie Thatcher Demko.
The All-Star has struggled mightily since his return in December from a knee injury that took eight months to conquer.
Demko stopped 31 of 32 Nashville shots, including a five-star, point-blank save on Zachary L’Heuroux late in the third period.
Pettersson drove a Tre Kronor line of fellow Swedes Nils Hoglander and Linus Karlsson that generated five-on-five goals for Vancouver before Pius Suter capped the win with an empty-net goal with 19 seconds remaining.
Hoglander scored beautifully on a rush at 7:11 of the first period, and Karlsson broke a 1-1 tie by converting Tyler Myers’ laser pass through traffic at 1:28 of the second for the 25-year-old rookie’s first NHL goal.
Defenceman Quinn Hughes, continuing to play at the level of the gods, assisted on both goals and now has 58 points in 46 games to lead all NHL blue-liners.
The Canucks will try to sweep their three-game road trip Friday against the Dallas Stars before returning home to face the media — and the Detroit Red Wings — on Sunday.
It is impossible to pretend the “noise” doesn’t exist when it is being amplified by the team president, but Miller declined to comment Wednesday morning when asked about Rutherford’s remarks the previous day.
“I don’t have one,” Miller said of his reaction. “I’m not commenting on this.”
Silence is probably a pretty good strategy on this dressing-room issue, albeit about three months too late.
On the ice, Miller had one of his least effective games in the last two weeks. He struggled to drive play and made some key mistakes, including a turnover inside the Nashville blue line that led to a shorthanded breakaway in the third period for Gustav Nyquist. But Miller also led the Canucks with five hits and won a key faceoff in the final minute.
For the game, Canucks centres won only 18 of 50 draws, with Miller doing the best at 7-8. At 58 per cent for the season, Miller is the only Vancouver pivot significantly above .500 on faceoffs, which are a tactical issue the team will have to grapple with if efforts to trade him are successful.
Coach Rick Tocchet made the hard decision to play Demko ahead of Kevin Lankinen, who we said in this space on Monday deserved a run of starts after badly outplaying the struggling No. 1. Lankinen stopped 56 of 59 shots in wins against Washington and St. Louis and spent the last two seasons in Nashville, so starting against the Predators would have meant a lot to him.
But the Canucks, obviously, are still trying to get Demko going and last season’s Vezina Trophy runner-up re-paid Tocchet’s risky choice with an outstanding performance. After losing four of his previous five starts in regulation (and lugging an .867 save rate into Wednesday), Demko wasn’t impressive only for the saves he was making, but how efficiently and confidently he appeared to be playing, tracking pucks and mostly controlling rebounds.
Tommy Novak was the only Predator to beat Demko, and he did it with his skate, dragging a foot to steer in a first-period rebound while being checked by Suter. Demko stopped the final 25 shots he faced and was Vancouver’s best player as his team was being outshot 19-9 over the final two periods.
After missing 11 games with a leg injury when Canucks teammate Teddy Blueger knocked Predators defenceman Roman Josi into him from behind during a Jan. 3 game in Vancouver, winger Dakota Joshua returned to the Vancouver lineup to resume his comeback from testicular cancer.
Joshua missed the first month of the season after undergoing surgery in September to remove a tumour. So, any game is a good game for Joshua. He survived his first game back, registering two hits in 11:48 of ice time while skating on the fourth line with Blueger and Phil Di Giuseppe. Defenceman Max Sasson came out of Tocchet’s lineup.
On defence, Noah Juulsen replaced callup Elias Pettersson (D-Petey) after missing six games with an undisclosed injury.
Thatcher Demko: “I kind of needed that one. It felt good to be on the winning side here, and, you know, feel like myself a little bit again. It always feels good when you win. Yeah, a lot to build off. I think we’ve been doing some good things. So it’s really just paying attention to detail, knowing our identity as a team, playing as five all three zones. . . just the cliche stuff.”
