Canucks Army Post-Game: HockeyTown Beatdown

Photo Credit: Raj Mehta- USA TODAY Sports

There’s no place like home. Surely that’s the Canucks’ rallying cry in the wake of today’s 3-1 loss to the Detroit Red Wings. That’s their tenth loss in eleven games; the fifth loss they’ve suffered on this six game Eastern swing.

The Canucks brought their best tonight. At least the best they can muster without their premier shutdown defender and arguably their most dynamic forward. They outshot the Red Wings 37-27; out-attempted them 46-33 at even strength.

Playing in his third straight game — an anomaly in the post-Petr Mrazek landscape — Jimmy Howard was up to the task. For every Canucks charge, there was a Howard answer — all except one, I should add.

Dylan Larkin opened the scoring 32 seconds into the opening frame for Detroit. A nifty behind the net, no-look pass by Gustav Nyquist set up Henrik Zetterberg in the slot. Ryan Miller was dandy on the spot for Zetterberg’s try but was caught out of position when the speedy youngster Larkin picked up the rebound.

From there, it looked like the Canucks were on their way to another lopsided loss. The Canucks didn’t muster their real first shot until about seven-plus minutes into the game.

Vancouver found its game. By periods end they’d tilted the territorial battle in their favour handily. How much of that was score effects is a fair question, though. Especially with the Brendan Smith marker near the end of the first doubling the Red Wings lead.

Two players who didn’t ride the Canucks territorial swing were Erik Gudbranson and Ben Hutton. As a pair, the two were hard-matched against Larkin for about half of the game before Canucks Head Coach Willie Desjardins conceded defeat. The pair controlled 37% of unblocked shot attempts at even strength. Vancouver controlled north of 58% of shot attempts from that switch onward.

After two periods spent primarily in the Red Wings end, Vancouver broke through. Troy Stecher stopped an attempted clear to feed the Sedin twins in the slot. They worked their magic, and three passes later the Canucks were within a goal of tying this. 

The Sedinery on the play was nice, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think Jason Botchford’s in the wrong assigned a great deal of credit on the play to Stecher for his hold at the blue line. The still he captured is very telling.

That’s as close as the Canucks came to knotting this game at two. Steve Ott deflected a Jonathan Ericsson shot past Miller for a 3-2 lead midway through the third. Though Vancouver pressed late, pulled the goaltender and mounted a final charge, they couldn’t break through Howard.

In fact, it was Miller who stole the show in the final minutes. This was probably the finest of his 24 saves.