On Thursday night the best show on ice played in the Thirty Mile Zone.
It was another dominant performance from Quinn Hughes, as the Vancouver Canucks defeated the Los Angeles Kings 3-2.
At the moment, Hughes is drinking his opponent’s milkshake, and on Thursday night, that dynamic was especially apparent. Hughes was laughing after blocking shots, he was barking at young Kings star defender Brandt Clarke and he had the entirety of the game on a string.
His game-winning goal and the flurry of dekes that preceded it will find their way onto sizzle reels, but once again, it was the subtle aspects of the game that permitted Hughes to take over. The quickness with which he consistently harpooned pucks away from attacking forwards, the efficiency with which he keyed the attack the other way — both as a puck carrier and as a distributor — and the way the Kings never appeared to find a good answer for those five-on-five minutes in which Hughes and his partner Filip Hronek were on the ice together at five-on-five.
Quinn Hughes is on another level right now the way he controls pucks. Elite hands, vision and edge work. #Canucks
(Via: Sportsnet) pic.twitter.com/MIOxX9yzAG
— Grady Sas (@GradySas) November 8, 2024
When Hughes scored the goal to provide Vancouver with a two-goal third-period lead, the shot counter when he was on the ice at five-on-five read eight Canucks shots on goal to just one shot on goal for the Kings. For any NHL defender, that level of territorial dominance is spectacular. It is for Hughes too, of course, but it’s become something we have to be intentional about keeping in mind given how routine it’s become.
What Hughes is doing isn’t normal, and it shouldn’t be taken for granted. There is simply no other defender on the planet exerting this sort of impact with this level of consistency.
Hughes has hit that rare level, and it was pronounced especially in those five-on-five minutes when Vancouver self-matched its top pair with the J.T. Miller line, where it was obvious by about the halfway mark of the victory over the Kings that, even as the result was still in doubt, Los Angeles was helpless to stop Hughes from doing just about whatever he wanted.
This well-structured, hardworking, talented, playoff-calibre Kings team has a lot of things going for it, but Vancouver has Hughes. On Thursday night, that was the difference.
Let’s open up our Canucks notebook and flesh out some thoughts on the club’s perfect California road trip.
A suspension has to be coming for Jeannot
Tanner Jeannot was issued a match penalty for this hit on Brock Boeser. pic.twitter.com/TmL47Ae2Xt
— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) November 8, 2024
During the first period in Los Angeles, the Canucks sustained a significant loss when Brock Boeser left the game with an apparent head injury following a dirty hit thrown by Los Angeles Kings forward Tanner Jeannot. Boeser didn’t return to the contest.
After reviewing the play, the officials rightly assessed Jeannot a match penalty, which speaks volumes by itself. A match penalty is assessed for Rule 48 violations in which the officials determine that the hitter “attempted to, or deliberately injured his opponent with an illegal check to the head.” The Department of Player Safety reviews every match penalty, and this particular hit has a lot of the hallmarks of plays that have previously resulted in the hitter facing supplementary discipline.
In particular, this is clearly a high forceful hit thrown by Jeannot and Boeser’s head is obviously the main point of contact. Further, this is an example of a play in which contact with the head was avoidable. Lastly, Boeser’s position in no way materially changes prior to the hit being thrown.
Jeannot had plenty of opportunity and time to judge the angle correctly and hit Boeser through the core of his body. His abject failure to do so resulted in an injury to his opponent.
While the Kings described it as a bang-bang play postgame and Canucks head coach Rick Tocchet suggested it was a “dangerous play,” this sort of illegal contact to the head tends to draw a suspension. And it should. A match penalty is insufficiently punitive to punish a hit like this, and the case for supplementary discipline, in this instance, is about as open and shut as it gets.
Tocchet didn’t provide much of an update on Boeser’s status postgame. The club also didn’t disclose the nature of Boeser’s injury and whether or not the star forward was in concussion protocol, but if he is, return-to-play procedures generally take multiple days to clear.
Could it be Lekkerimäki time?
When Jonathan Lekkerimäki made his AHL debut toward the end of last season, he wasn’t quite ready. There were moments and flashes where his goal scoring acumen and offensive instincts were apparent, but the North American professional game is a massive adjustment, and it showed.
At the Penticton Young Stars tournament and Canucks training camp, Lekkerimäki impressed, but there were some obvious areas of his game to work on. His downhill attacking instincts are dynamic but his instincts for playing a team game and contributing to the build-up looked like a work in progress. He also looked like he might need to add some core strength and polish to his edges in order to protect the puck down low at the NHL level as a smaller-bodied winger.
After the start of his season was slightly delayed due to illness, Lekkerimäki has emerged in the AHL over the past few weeks like a bolt of lightning. In his seven Abbotsford Canucks games this season, Lekkerimäki has scored five goals, produced at a point-per-game clip and taken a preposterous 39 shots — averaging over five shots on goal per game. That’s an undeniable level of production for anybody, but especially for a 20-year-old forward beginning his first full season in North America.
One hopes that Boeser will be available to return to the Canucks lineup soon. Likewise for Dakota Joshua, who has yet to play this season.
If the club requires an additional right-handed scoring forward in the short term, however, you would think that Lekkerimäki will be the top option. His performance over the past few weeks in the AHL has been special enough to demand it.
Canucks’ defensive game goes up a level
Going into this sweep of a California road trip, there were some signs that the Canucks’ defensive game had fallen off in the early portion of this campaign.
Granted we’re judging it against the ridiculously high standard that this club managed to set defensively in 2023-24, but through Vancouver’s first 11 games of the season, the club was surrendering inner slot shots at a league average rate (something this team excelled at limiting last season), according to Sportlogiq’s data, and looked vulnerable with surprising regularity off the rush.
With how many new faces the club has been integrating after a busy offseason, an adjustment period was probably going to be necessary. Adding to the degree of difficulty is how the Canucks have also been deliberately going through an evolution of sorts as a team, with a heavy focus on adding some offensive aggression to their style of play. Some defensive seams were always likely to become visible occasionally as the club turned that dial to take more chances and attack more frequently off the rush.
It’s still early in the season and two consecutive games of suffocating lockdown defence — the Canucks were exceptionally stingy as a defensive unit against the Anaheim Ducks and the Kings — probably isn’t enough for us to declare that the club has settled into its identity or found its defensive game.
But after a couple of concerning performances on home ice in late October against the New Jersey Devils and Carolina Hurricanes, the Canucks’ defensive game has bounced back, and has bounced back without appearing to compromise the club’s early season offensive gains.
Under the hood, there are a couple of key trends that are worth noting. First off, the Hughes and Hronek pair was ridiculous on the club’s three-game California road trip. The club outshot the San Jose Sharks, Ducks and Kings by a combined 30-15 margin with Hughes on the ice five-on-five, and outscored opponents 5-0 with the top pair on the ice. Right off the hop, Vancouver was sledding downhill because it was crushing the matchups at the top end of the lineup.
That’s nothing new, however, it’s been like that all season. What’s new, and a welcome sign, is that things appear to have stabilized somewhat for Vancouver’s second pair. For whatever reason the pair of Carson Soucy and Tyler Myers, who were excellent for the club in the 2024 Stanley Cup playoffs, have struggled in the early part of this season. While the club has been outshot and outscored by a wide margin for much of the campaign with the Soucy-Myers pair on the ice, that trend was arrested in California.
During this road trip, the Soucy-Myers pair was able to be in the black by shot differential and only conceded one goal against at five-on-five across Vancouver’s three victories. When the second pair plays at that level, given what we’ve come to expect from Hughes-Hronek, this team is very, very difficult to beat.
On Saturday night the Edmonton Oilers will roll into Vancouver and offer a stiffer test than what the Canucks faced in the Golden State over the past week. When the team that eliminated Vancouver from the playoffs steps onto the ice at Rogers Arena this weekend, it’s going to face off against a Canucks team whose defensive form has appeared to hit another level over the last handful of games.
(Photo: Kelly Smiley / NHLI via Getty Images)
