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Instant Reaction: Elias Pettersson was great, but Canucks blow another multi-goal lead in loss to Vegas

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Photo credit:© Bob Frid-USA TODAY Sports
David Quadrelli
1 year ago
Welcome to Instant Reaction — a new series at CanucksArmy where we give you our quick instant reaction post game and encourage our readers to do the same in the comments section below! The Stanchies by Wyatt Arndt are up now, and you can read them by clicking here! The Statsies will be up later this morning.
The Vancouver Canucks blew another multi-goal lead tonight.
But this time it felt different.
Where do we even begin with this one? The Canucks were right there with the Vegas Golden Knights. They entered the third period down by a goal and came out guns blazing right off the hop.
The Canucks got three quick goals from Bo Horvat, Luke Schenn, and Elias Pettersson early in the third period to take a 4-2 lead. But as has happened so many times already — seven to be exact — the Canucks blew their third-period multi-goal lead.
How do you even explain that? It feels like each one has been different, but yet the same.
Tonight was an interesting one because the Canucks’ best players played like their best players, and that included Thatcher Demko (and the camera lens that took back what would have been Vegas’ first go-ahead goal). Demko was great through two periods of play and made some key saves to keep the Canucks in this one early. But in the third period, it felt like Demko couldn’t buy a save — largely due to the quality of chances being given up and lack of coverage in front of him — and that the Canucks’ collapse was simply inevitable.
Pettersson was electric all over the ice, and although the stat line shows just one goal for his efforts, Pettersson really did do it all tonight. As per usual, he was more than reliable in his own end, created offence, and even kept the Canucks’ hopes alive with a sliding pad save while they had their net empty late in the game.
Tonight’s game was truly a rollercoaster. There were incredibly high highs and the same rock-bottom lows that Canucks fans have been down to so many times already this season.
Was it entertaining? Sure! Did it still highlight basically everything wrong with this team? You bet. And that’s what made it so hard to watch in the end.
Some key notes to point out: Brock Boeser has tallied a point in each of the seven games he’s played in since returning, and made a sweet feed to Andrei Kuzmenko for the first goal of the game in the second period.
Elias Pettersson tallied his tenth goal of the season and has goals in back-to-back games; and Bo Horvat scored his 15th of the year, doing everything he can to live up to his nickname of “Bogilny”, and get paid the most amount of money possible when he hits free agency this summer.
The final score of this one was 5-4 in favour of the Vegas Golden Knights.
The Stanchies and Statsies will both be posted tomorrow morning, but for now, we want to hear your instant reaction! Sound off in the comments section below!

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