“Canucks” Combust in Edmonton to End the Regular Season

Alright dudes, we finished outside the bottom-5! Can’t wait for summer vacation and a standing O from the fans!
Photo by John Ulan/NHLI via Getty Images

The playoff matchups are set and the Canucks will face a very good hockey team in the San Jose Sharks in their first round series this week. It promises to be a good one, partly because it’ll feature a Canucks team that doesn’t play the likes of Derek Joslin and Cam Barker for nearly twenty-minutes a game. On Saturday night, the Canucks did just that and were stomped by the Edmonton Oilers in a really ugly five minute span. Last month in Edmonton that span came right at the start of the game, and on Saturday night it came right at the end. As the Canucks advance to the playoffs, perhaps we should be happy that they won’t face the young Oilers in Edmonton exclusively on Hockey Night in Canada in the first round…

Read past the jump for scoring chance data and some analysis.

– Let’s start with the scoring chance data before dissecting the latest overwrought controversies to crop up as a result of completely meaningless game. The Edmonton Oilers were the better club on Saturday, although not by as much as the final score suggested. I have the Oilers out-chancing the Canucks 22 to 14 overall in the contest and 16 to 11 at even-strength. With the score tied however the Canucks actually controlled the chance battle eleven to eight, a number that flatters the Oilers considering half of those eight scoring chances came on their five-on-three power-play opportunity early in the third. Realistically I think the Canucks were pretty good – albeit with a bit of a hiccup of a second period – through fifty minutes on Saturday night, but then surrendered six even strength chances in the final seven minutes of the game. The Oilers got goals on five of those six chances…

– Roberto Luongo is getting a lot of attention post game for getting lit up and not talking to the press afterwards. I’m sure he’s pissed about allowing goals on five of the last six difficult shots he faced, but the idea that this will ding his confidence heading into the postseason strikes me as ludicrous. Some of Luongo’s signature performances in a Canucks uniform have come directly after some of his worst games (like that shutout in game five of the Stanley Cup Final after he allowed, like, twelve goals against in two games in Boston, or his epic game seven performance against the Blackhawks after he stunk up the joint in games four, five and then didn’t even start in game six). Roberto Luongo is teflon, and though he was clearly upset about his performance (and the performance of the team in front of him) on Saturday night, the idea that his performance will suffer going forward as a result just isn’t logical when you consider A) Luongo’s track record and B) the nature of fluctuations in save percentage.

– Henrik Sedin meanwhile is getting a lot of attention for playing twenty-two seconds of the game before hitting the showers. Ostensibly all he really did was keep his iron man streak alive which strikes me as a little bit vain, but those acting like he just laid down and let Michael Strahan sack him to set a record are taking this a bit far. An "iron man" streak is silly anyway – you can have such a streak ended if you take a game off while your wife gives birth, which seems dumb; and you get no points for appearing in the playoffs which seems even more dumb – so who really cares? Maybe Henrik should’ve had it snapped but this is just the smallest potatoe issue in the whole bag of small potatoes.

– Maxim Lapierre probably shouldn’t be centering a top-three line come playoff time. In 18 minutes on Saturday he got completely smoked by the Sam Gagner line which doesn’t bode well for how he’ll fare against line centered by, say, Logan Couture or Joe Pavelski. 

– Andrew Ebbett didn’t have an awful game all things considered. I’ll just throw that one out there and let it hang around.

– Frank Corrado was Vancouver’s lowest-event defenseman and played the second most minutes behind only Kevin Bieksa (who was a bit of a high-event disaster, though much of the damage against him came on one awful shift early in the second period). Bieksa is a high-event defenseman though, and he looked mobile and eager to scrap on Saturday night so that’s a great sign.

– The Chris Higgins, Derek Roy, Ryan Kesler line played legitimately well. That’s not a surprise, but they were the only Vancouver players who really managed to keep their heads above water.

– Mason Raymond had just a woeful month to end the season and I’m not sure how you can justify keeping him in the top-nine, frankly, much less the top-six. Number 21 had another weak outing on Saturday, and sent the puck over the glass early in the third period to set up the five-on-three power-play opportunity that the Canucks never really recovered from…

– That’s really all I’ve got. The team hits the reset button now and we await the playoff schedule. Depending on the outcome of Sunday’s Senators, Bruins game it’s even possible that the Canucks could be on TSN this postseason, which, actually I’d be all for. Ray Ferraro better work on his "great save Luongo" call.