VANCOUVER — Speed kills in the National Hockey League.
On Saturday night at Rogers Arena, the Vancouver Canucks looked stuck in the mud for the first 24 minutes. The reeling Pittsburgh Penguins, playing their second game in as many days, had frustrated their power play, contained Vancouver at the top of the lineup and capitalized on a few mistakes, building a 2-0 lead early in the first period.
When the game turned, however, it was in the blink of an eye. Vancouver got a big goal from Elias Pettersson, his first five-on-five goal since early March, and clicked almost immediately into gear. Within roughly a minute Vancouver skated the Penguins right off of the ice on their way to a 4-3 victory.
The storylines were as plentiful as Vancouver’s second period goals — Pettersson breaking his duck, Tyler Myers’ 1,000th game ceremony and Arshdeep Bains scoring the first goal of his promising young career. But Saturday night’s game was fundamentally decided by a run of rush attacking sequences for Vancouver. As the game went on this aging, fatigued Penguins squad had no answer for Vancouver’s jailbreak speed.
Once Vancouver got out and started to manufacture scoring chances off of the rush, the game quickly tilted in the Canucks’ favour. In fact, it transformed into a complete mismatch.
Here are three takeaways from the Canucks’ fourth consecutive victory:
Kiefer Sherwood, Daniel Sprong and Vancouver’s new forward depth
This was a night where you could really see the theory behind Vancouver’s offseason approach pay off in practice.
Vancouver went about collecting wing speed this offseason, accepting a slight step back in the quality of their back-end with the departures of Nikita Zadorov and Ian Cole and at centre, once Elias Lindholm spurned the club’s full-court press effort to retain him.
Rather than attempting to double down on the controlled, systematic defensive game that carried the Canucks to such a miraculous 2023-24 campaign, the club aspired to be something more. To build a team with enough offensive dynamism that they might credibly contend for a Stanley Cup, as opposed to being satisfied with being a tough, pesky out in the playoffs.
The early returns on Vancouver’s ambitious approach have been a bit mixed in the early going, but when it’s looked the way it’s supposed to — as it did in the second period on Saturday night — it’s a sight to behold.
Even before Elias Pettersson broke his duck and got Vancouver on the board, it was a key sequence from Sherwood — while Vancouver was still trailing 2-0 early in the second frame — who created a turnover, bodied Marcus Pettersson on two occasions while chasing in his own dump in, and helped Vancouver set up an offensive zone sequence and slowly wrest momentum from Pittsburgh. Vancouver got their first goal of the game on the very next shift.
Sherwood then tied the game, finishing off a rush two-on-one sequence with Teddy Blueger, which he once again created with a sharp defensive play 150 feet away from where he shot the puck for the goal.
Then the club got a big insurance goal from Bains, the first of Bain’s career, with incoming free agent signing Sprong — a regular healthy scratch for the club in the early going here — creating the goal with a smart shot to create a gimme rebound for his linemate. Sprong, who might be one of this team’s most powerful skaters, streaked down the right wing to get himself into a shooting area on the goal.
In a sweet moment after Bains’ goal, it was Sprong who skated as quickly as he had with the puck through the neutral zone to centre ice to make sure to retrieve the souvenir puck for his young linemate.
Arshdeep Bains just scored his first goal of his career for his hometown team, at home, on a Saturday night against Sidney Crosby, while wearing the black skate.
That has to be the coolest moment ever.
— Logan (@CanuckSkate) October 27, 2024
Even on the 3-2 goal, scored by J.T. Miller, it was arguably the result of Vancouver’s new, evolving offensive identity.
Miller may have been in Vancouver last season — and for the last five years — but with the way this team played last season, it’s unlikely he would have found himself in space the way he did on the 3-2 goal that completed Vancouver’s impressive comeback blitz in the second frame.
All three of Vancouver’s rush attacking sequences in the second period were a marker of the progress this team has made. It’s the result of a thoughtful approach, combining player personnel acquisition and systematic adjustments from Vancouver’s coaching staff, to raise the ceiling of what this club can accomplish.
Gone in 65 seconds
One minute the Canucks were trailing 2-0 and on their way to a mystifying performance against a Penguins team that they were heavily favoured to defeat on Saturday night.
The next, they held a commanding 3-2 lead. The game completely flipped on its head.
Goal scoring outbursts this dramatic are incredibly rare. On only two previous occasions in franchise history have the Canucks managed to bury an opponent with a three-goal sequence this dramatic — in the mid-1990s against the Los Angeles Kings, and the early 1980s against the Penguins (ironically).
The deluge that the Canucks managed in the early 1980s, however, comes with an amusing qualifier. Having scored three goals in just 58 seconds in that contest, Vancouver added a fourth goal just 25 seconds later. Talk about pouring it on.
Within the confines of that incredible 83-second run, the club managed two separate three-goal streaks that stand up as the second- and third-fastest three-goal runs in Canucks franchise history. What Vancouver did to speed bag the Penguins on Saturday, meanwhile, holds up as the fourth-quickest three-goal sequence in franchise history.
Canucks power play struggles
It wasn’t all rainbows, butterflies, black skate jerseys and “J.T. Miller” chants at Rogers Arena on Saturday night.
As well as Vancouver played and as impressive as they’ve occasionally been on this early season four-game win streak, the club’s power play stands out as something of a concern. It didn’t ultimately matter because of what the club was able to do in full flight off the rush in the second frame, but in the first period, the Canucks wasted three key power-play opportunities and generated next to nothing on those chances.
In over five and a half minutes of power play time in the first period, for example, Vancouver generated just seven shot attempts and four shots on goal. One could argue that the short-handed chances they surrendered to the Penguins were as dangerous, or even more, than the ones Vancouver created on the man advantage.
In the early going the Canucks have already tweaked the personnel on their first power-play unit. They’ve also been relatively successful from a raw conversion rate perspective.
When we zoom out and look at the underlying form of Vancouver’s power-play units, however, it’s clear that they’re generating at one of the lowest rates in the league in this season’s early going. They’re struggling massively to get setup efficient, with both the first and second power-play units on the ice. The usual creativity that Vancouver’s best players demonstrate while snapping the puck around the offensive zone five-on-four is far too regularly amounting to a few looks of real consequence.
Vancouver has too much top-end talent not to figure it out eventually, but through seven games, it’s the one area of their game that’s cause for some concern. Especially given how costly the club’s wasted power-play opportunities proved to be in the biggest moments of last season.
(Top photo: Bob Frid / Imagn Images)
