It’s the news Vancouver Canucks fans were hoping they wouldn’t hear at any point this year.

Elias Pettersson is “banged up” and missed today’s practice.

Now, whether Pettersson’s “banged upped-ness” — we want to avoid calling it an “injury — came from being the unintended and unfortunate recipient of a Tyler Myers slap shot during Tuesday night’s 2-0 loss to the Philadelphia Flyers isn’t quite known, but Pettersson did appear shaken up on the play last night.

Pettersson did remain in the game, however, so hopefully today’s absence from practice turns out to be all Tocchet hopes it is: a maintenance day before jumping back into the lineup tomorrow night.

Let’s get into who was there at practice today, and what else went down.

Courtesy of Thomas Drance, here are the Canucks’ line rushes:

-As expected, it looks like Mark Friedman’s arrival is going to mean that Noah Juulsen is the odd man out. Juulsen and Tyler Myers, among others, were awful last night in Philadelphia, so Friedman’s addition comes at a very good time. Even if he’s not spectacular, him just being okay will raise the level of internal competition on the right side of the Canucks’ blue line.
-Mark Friedman will wear number 51 with the Canucks.
-The Canucks just don’t have many options right now to change up their lines too much, so it will be interesting to see what kind of response we see tomorrow night in Tampa.

Rick Tocchet further reflected on last night’s loss:

“It’s a message,” said Tocchet when speaking about Wednesday’s practice. “We had a good meeting today, and the one thing with the players and coaches here [is] we tell it straight. We know where we were at last game and it’s a new day. We had a good game [in] game one, [in the] second game we kind of hung on and then obviously the third game wasn’t a good effort in a lot of areas. So now we reset, had a good practice today and move on to Tampa.”

Tocchet also said that Casey DeSmith will get into one more game on this road trip.

He then spoke about some takeaways from Wednesday’s meetings as the team spoke about what went wrong on Tuesday in Philadephia.

“I know the intent of guys, they don’t want to lose battles,” said Tocchet. “It’s just our technique. Get in on somebody. They had about four one-man-forechecks and they end up with the puck. You can’t have that happen. We get a chance to win puck battles with a second quick and he’s late. It was like, for some reason, we’re on their heels. And it just pinballs right, it just, it just multiplies. You get the odd player or shift that, ‘Hey, they don’t want to battle’ but you can’t have the third, the fourth, the fifth, [or] the sixth shift, lose battles in a row or you can have on our breakouts, losing three one-man forechecks in the first period you get they just add up and that’s why [Demko’s] got to be all-world. So, that’s the stuff we got to clean up.

Puck drop is at 4 PM Pacific Time tomorrow night!