It was a tense, bruising game and the Vancouver Canucks came away from the contest with two points.
No, it wasn’t an impressionist painting, nor was it especially convincing, but what Vancouver’s 3-2 overtime victory over the Florida Panthers lacked in aesthetic appeal it made up for by being so hard won.
The Panthers, the defending Stanley Cup champions, play an aggressive, pressure-based game. They grant no quarter.
No matter who is absent from the Panthers lineup — and the Panthers were without all-World centre Aleksander Barkov, and superstar winger Matthew Tkachuk on Thursday evening — space is at a premium when you visit South Florida. Every square centimetre of ice is hotly contested.
Within that environment, and working against the ghosts of slow starts past and the naturally mounting pressure they apply, the Canucks handled that pressure and managed to get better as the game went on at the Amerant Bank Arena on Thursday night. Vancouver’s third period push was impressive, a departure from what Vancouver had showed us in three uneven performances across the first week of the campaign.
Kevin Lankinen put in another better-than-steady showing in goal. Canucks skaters avoided the big mistakes that had cost them in previous games. And Vancouver’s best players made the difference, and won the game.
J.T. Miller’s contributions make him the obvious headliner. He scored the overtime winner by streaking down the right wing and beating a set Sergei Bobrovsky clean with a lethal wrist shot. It was another meaningful goal in a big moment for Miller, a marker that will permit the entire team to breath just a little bit easier when they arrive in Philadelphia on Friday.
Even Elias Pettersson, the sharp criticism of his vanishing production now a national storyline, put in his best performance of the season. Pettersson hit a cross bar and racked up heavy shifts while appearing to find some chemistry with new linemates Conor Garland and Nils Höglander.
Make no mistake though, this was the Quinn Hughes show.
Hughes scored his first goal of the season with an assertive second effort in Vancouver’s first victory, but his impact on Thursday night was total.
He was easily the most impactful skater in the game, the other nine skaters and the puck in orbit around the gravity that he manufactured every shift with clean breakouts, quick takeaways, creativity, and an exceptionally high volume of shots — most of them far higher value looks than most defenders take.
Hughes and his defence partner Filip Hronek were even able to create the space to interchange up high in the offensive zone on multiple occasions, fashioning excellent looks repeatedly in the process. That’s space that’s been hard for Hughes and Hronek to come by over the past 50 games or so, given how focused Canucks opponents have become at denying it.
To operate that effectively on Thursday night against a side as stout as the Panthers represents a very good night at the office for Vancouver’s top pair.
For much of the night, in truth, it looked like the Panthers and the Canucks were engaged in two separate games simultaneously. There was the game when Hughes was on the ice, and the game when he wasn’t.
When Hughes was on the ice, the play tilted toward the Panthers end of the rink, and Bobrovsky had to be sharp in those minutes — and was, on this night. When Hughes wasn’t on the ice, however, the Canucks manufactured very little, the Panthers forecheck played and the balance of the contest shifted to the Vancouver end of the rink.
All’s well that ends well, and on Thursday night, Vancouver held up in those non-Hughes minutes. In fact, the only five-on-five goal the Canucks surrendered was scored by Jesper Boqvist against Vancouver’s top pair. Beyond the scoreboard though, Vancouver’s first win of the season served to underline just how significantly, perhaps too significantly, this Canucks team has come to rely on Hughes’ brilliance in the early going this season.
Consider that with Hughes on the ice at even strength, Vancouver outshot the Panthers by a two-to-one ratio (18 to nine) with Hughes personally taking eight of those shots. In all other minutes, the shot counter favoured Florida by an 18 to 11 margin.
This is a continuation of a trend that’s persisted throughout Vancouver’s first four games. Where Vancouver has outshot their opponents by 19 with Hughes on the ice five-on-five so far this season, they’ve been outshot by a whopping 27 without him. There’s no Vancouver defender currently in the black by goal differential at even strength this season, aside from Hughes and Hronek.
Hughes’ absolute impact on the environment of Vancouver’s games is being felt in every phase. The club generates shots at an elite rate when Hughes is on the ice and generates shots at a league worst rate without him. Vancouver rarely surrenders shots when Hughes is on the ice, their shots against rate besting the best lockdown defensive team in hockey, but has the profile of a permissive bottom-five defense in his absence.
This impact even shows up with Vancouver’s forwards on an individual level. On Thursday night, Vancouver outshot their opponents nine to two with Miller on the ice and seven to two with Pettersson on the ice, in the minutes either forward shared with Hughes. Vancouver was outshot 10-to-three with Miller on the ice away from Hughes, however, and four-to-two in Pettersson’s solo minutes.
On the season, it’s the same storyline. Vancouver’s two top-six centremen are being outshot by a two-to-one margin away from Hughes, and absolutely taking it to their opponents whenever they’re backed up by the Hronek and Hughes duo.
When the samples are this small early in the season, when the splits are this extreme and when a team isn’t quite rolling just yet, you’ll often encounter some astounding usage patterns. For Hughes, that shows up in his minutes logged.
Through four games the Canucks captain is averaging 27:15 per game, which ranks second in the NHL behind only Nashville Predators star Roman Josi. The gap between Hughes and Josi’s minutes is small (four seconds per game), but there’s a context gap that’s wider.
Where both Josi’s Predators and Hughes’ Canucks have struggled in the early going, Vancouver’s struggles are relative to expectations whereas the Predators’ struggles have been far more significant. As such, the Predators have, astoundingly, trailed for 90 more minutes than Vancouver has through just four games. Adjusted for game script, it’s probably fair to describe Hughes as the most heavily utilized player in the NHL in the early part of the 2024-25 campaign.
Naturally there are questions of sustainability that stem from all of this. If Hughes has to play this often and perform this well for Vancouver to win, what does that mean for the Canucks over the rest of the season?
There are also the questions of how to fix the issue internally. Will the club have to consider splitting Hughes and Hronek if this dynamic persists? Can Tocchet and assistant coach Adam Foote, who runs the defence, sort through and help Vancouver’s depth defenders find solutions and engineer a way out of their own end more reliably?
Finally there’s the big picture question of what external solutions the club will seek out, perhaps sooner than we might reasonably expect, based on how aggressively Jim Rutherford and Patrik Allvin have tinkered with this lineup throughout their Vancouver tenure. It’s worth recalling that when Akito Hirose and Noah Juulsen struggled in Vancouver’s second game of the year last season, a game the club won we might add, Canucks management promptly dealt for Mark Friedman to boost their third pair options.
However it shakes out, the Canucks should have enough talent to win games with one engine firing on all cylinders. To get to where this team intends on going, however, they’ll need to find a way to jumpstart a few more.
(Photo: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)
