Headshots: January 24th

Here’s sparkly Maxim Lapierre because why the hell not?
Photo credit: Sealcat.tumblr.com.

Following Wednesday night’s feel good shootout win over the Calgary Flames, all of our favorite Canucks blog are rolling out their post-game content staples. Now I’m sure most of you reading this only check the Canucks Army gamers (and scoring chance data) after you watch a Canucks game, and I totally understand why, but the Smylosphere is chalk full of excellent stuff. So let me recommend some post-game coverage for you from some of our (apparently not so) bitter rivals:

So there you go. Obviously The Province, The Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun do their gamers too (and those gamers are usually very interesting) but you already knew about all of that. So I figured I’d offer you a quick round up of the best postgame content that the Canucks blogosphere regularly has to offer. Get reading!

Some injury notes from today’s Canucks practice, where Alain Vigneault also named his team’s starter for Saturday night per Jeff Paterson:

Man, oh man. With Ryan Kesler and David Booth already out of the lineup, the Canucks really can’t afford to lose a versatile player like Maxim Lapierre at this point. I wonder if Lapierre was struggling with his groin earlier in the week (and this is just the first we’ve heard of it), since that would in part explain Dale Weise’s promotion to the top-9. 

Meanwhile Schneider, who looked shaky at times on Wednesday but did well to get the job done, will make his second straight start against the team that ventilated him in the season opener: the Anaheim "Don’t call us Mighty" Ducks.

David Ebner has a lengthy profile of Zack Kassian on the powerforward’s 22nd birthday. Because of his general enormousness, it’s crazy to think that Zack Kassian is still so young. It’s hard (but also really, really fun) to imagine what a monster he’s going to be when he really grows up over the next couple of years. Frightening thought, that. [Globe and Mail]

More spitballing on shootouts, and other links to Canucks news on the other side of the jump.

Jason Botchford calls out Alain Vigneault’s selection of Daniel Sedin as the third shooter in Wedneday night’s shootout bullshit loser point gimmick. Daniel is pretty clearly not a good shootout option and that should be clear to everyone at this point – in fact, he’s an outlier in shootout effectiveness, posting a conversion rate nearly 20% below league average over twenty-two attempts. [The Province]

So Botch is spot on here: by putting Daniel Sedin into the shootout over Zack Kassian or Mason Raymond, Vigneault basically forced Schneider to make an extra save. Then again, we don’t know if Daniel asked his coach, or what other sort of result-independent angle Vigneault may have been playing with that selection. Still, that was kind of a dumb move by Vigneault, though so long as he continues to rollout Edler and Burrows in the highest leverage spots in the shootout, I won’t criticize him too much. 

Speaking of which, Zack Kassian’s forehand backhand deke on the shootout winner was just nasty:

Between the AHL and the NHL, Zack Kassian has now converted 5 out of 8 shootout attempts in his professional career. That’s a tiny sample, and probably not indicative of his true talent, but yeah, I think we can describe a 63% conversion rate through eight attempts as "promising." It’s probably time to make him the designated third shooter in the skills competition…

Iain Macintyre talks to Jordan Schroeder’s dad about the long-road the Canucks prospect has taken to reach the NHL. Generally speaking I thought Jordan Schroeder acquitted himself very well in Wednesday night’s game, and while he barely sniffed the ice in over-time he wasn’t benched late in the third (like Vigneault is known to do when deploying a defensively suspect rookie). That suggests to me that Vigneault thought highly of him too, so that’s good news. [Vancouver Sun]

Brad Ziemer tweets that the Canucks have dropped Air Canada as their carrier and have presumably worked out a new arrangement with someone else.

The Canucks are looking for a new intro song to replace "Where the Streets have no Name" when the Canucks players skate out for pre-game warmups. So far they’re choosing between Muse and something called Stock-Holm that just completely fucking sucks. My vote? The Ratatat remix of Party and Bullshit. [Canucks.nhl.com]

Tony Gallagher channels Thoreau, and reveals beyond a shadow of a doubt that he needs to do a bit more research on the shootout. [The Province]

Let’s finish this post off with a look at the many faces of Zack Kassian courtesy sedintwins.tumblr.com. What a guy: