Canucks Drop a Gimme in Calgary

 
Cam Barker made his debut in a Canucks loss to the Flames on Sunday night.
Photo Credit: Gerry Thomas/NHLI via Getty Images

The Canucks barely made it out of Vancouver on Sunday evening in advance of their contest against Calgary. Once the team landed in cowtown, the Canucks had only a couple of hours to transition from the tarmac to the rink. Ultimately they may as well have stayed at home, as they frittered away two points against an overmatched opponent playing in front of an AHL goaltender…

There’s context here of course. Vancouver was coming off of an emotional home win over the Los Angeles Kings the night before and it’s no surprise that they put in a bit of a flat effort in the second game of a travelling back-to-back. Still, Vancouver started strong and ran out of gas late and fell behind for good on a goal that immediately followed a goofy "bench minor" penalty charged against Alain Vigneault in the third.  It was an appropriate way for a listless, frustrating game to end.

Read on past the jump for more analysis.

– Let’s begin with the core data. The Canucks were out-chanced 17-14 overall by the Flames on Sunday. In addition to that, Vancouver recorded thirteen scoring chances at even-strength to Calgary’s sixteen, and the Flames also controlled the game with the score tied recording ten scoring chances to Vancouver’s eight.

– So the Flames narrowly won the chance battle on Sunday night, but that still shouldn’t have been enough when you consider Vancouver’s supposed edge in goal. Needless to say Luongo has a more impressive resume at this level than Danny Taylor does. But Taylor was up to the task on Sunday, stopping twenty three of twenty-five shots including nine of twelve "difficult shots" he faced (scoring chances on goal, including misses that hit the post).

– Luongo actually had the superior save percentage on "difficult shots," (he stopped twelve of thirteen) but he allowed two goals on non-scoring chances including a real softy on a sneaky Mike Cammalleri wrister late in the first that tied the game. Ultimately those two goals were the difference. This loss wasn’t on Luongo or anything – the game-winning goal was particularly unlucky, bouncing in as it did off of Jason Garrison’s skate – but he obviously wasn’t "good enough" to get the win.

– Defenseman Cam Barker made his debut this evening and while he put in an uneven performance overall, that was enough to exceed my expectations for him. No his defensive positioning is not particularly good (though perhaps it will improve as he gets into more games) but he walks the line well in the offensive end and appeared to have a knack for threading the puck neatly through traffic on his point shots. Basically Cam Barker is a very similar type of player to Marc-Andre Gragnani: a high-event defenseman with perhaps some value in the offensive end.

– Coming off of their best performance of the year (hell, it might have been their best performance in a couple of years) the Sedin line was functionally hapless against the Flames this evening. I’d assume they were just exhausted but still, Daniel and Burrows posted a -6 scoring chance differential at even-strength, while Henrik was a -5 and that’s really not good enough to win. Beyond struggling to generate much of anything and spending far too much of the game in their own end of the rink, the twins and Burrows looked completely gassed in the third, and Daniel whiffed on a mostly open net in the game’s dying seconds. That’s the sort of scoring chance Daniel converts, what, 80% of the time? It just wasn’t Vancouver’s night…

– It’s a shame that the twins were so over-matched in this one, because the Canucks legitimately got some secondary scoring from the likes of Jannik Hansen, Chris Higgins and Mason Raymond (who hit a cross bar in the first period), and their newly formed third-line (of David Booth, Maxim Lapierre and Zack Kassian) was buzzing all game. David Booth’s inability to find the back of the net is beginning to reach comic proportions (he now has 13 shots in five games, and no goals) and he was probably Vancouver’s best offensive player tonight. He also seemed to have some chemistry with Zack Kassian, who had his best game in almost a month on Sunday.

– The Cam Barker, Alex Edler pairing were the definition of high-event in this one. Sure they looked dangerous in the offensive end, but they gave that back (and more) in their own end all night long. As such,  I can’t imagine that Alain Vigneault will be comfortable rolling them together too frequently going forward.

– After a lights-out game matched up against the Anze Kopitar line, Jason Garrison and Dan Hamhuis came back to Earth a bit in this one and both finished in the red by the chance data. The third pairing of Andrew Alberts and Chris Tanev were unspectacular, of course, but they were mostly successful against the bottom-end of Calgary’s roster.

– Finally, the game turned on an Alain Vigneault bench-minor that followed a Matt Stajan hit on Chris Tanev. Stajan got his elbow up around Tanev’s head and Vigneault was apopleptic, hounding the referee for the missed call. He was penalized and the Flames scored the game winner a second or two after the penalty expired. 

On the one hand, I like to see a coach do what he can to protect his players, and it was a goofy call in the third period of a tight game. On the other hand, anyway you slice it: that’s some weak game management from Alain Vigneault, and it turned out to be costly. By the way, here’s Vigneault’s account of what went down per Ed Willes:

So yeah, that’s pretty weird. All around, Sunday night’s game was a disappointing performance from the team, the refs, and the Canucks headcoach.