Welcome back to Instant Reaction — the series here at CanucksArmy where we bring you our instant reaction from every Vancouver Canucks game and encourage our readers to do the same in the comments section below! Wyatt Arndt is writing The Stanchies tonight and those will be posted later this evening. The Statsies — CanucksArmy’s analytics-based post game report by Mike Liu will be posted tomorrow morning.
Where do we begin?
Let’s start with where it ended. The Canucks put up 10 goals on the Sharks tonight.
San Jose has ten goals through ten games this season, including tonight’s loss to the Canucks.
There were a lot of positives tonight, and you could basically go up and down the stat sheet, select a random Canuck, and point out at least three things they did well tonight. And of course, Wyatt Arndt will have you covered on every single one of those positives later tonight in The Stanchies.
Here’s my instant reaction from tonight’s 10-1 thumping.
Tonight’s big takeaway
As the title suggests, there’s one thing that really stands out to me tonight, and that’s the Canucks business-like approach we’ve seen numerous times already this season. For years, we’ve watched this team go into games that they should win, only for them to put in a lackadaisical effort, lose, and for the captain to come out and call the effort “unacceptable,” only for the team to repeat the process a week or two later.
Tonight, Canucks fans were prepared to be disappointed. Instead, they watched their team come out ready to play, refusing to take the 0-8-1 Sharks lightly for even a second. The Sharks weren’t in this game at any point because the Canucks didn’t give them a chance to be. It was as simple as that tonight.
Tonight, we learned what fans hope to be true all season long: That this Canucks team truly has an identity. That they’re a hard-working group who don’t take any nights off. They already tried to do that in game three in Philadelphia, but Tocchet’s fiery response to that effort seems to have successfully nipped that in the bud.
Tocchet’s honesty and abruptness have been a breath of fresh air this season. After the Canucks’ Tuesday night win over Nashville, Tocchet was asked about Elias Pettersson’s hat trick performance — and he chose to highlight that Pettersson didn’t have his best game in other areas. It didn’t come across as him calling a player out or being unreasonable, either, especially when you know the standard EP40 holds himself to.
It’s a refreshing honesty. Even with his team having just won 10-0, it wouldn’t come as a surprise if Tocchet points out that Quinn Hughes took three minor penalties tonight even though he also put up five points. Anyways, this win against a team as bad as San Jose doesn’t tell us that the Canucks are legit, per se, but it did tell us that the Canucks are a more serious team than they’ve been in recent years.
So far, that’s translated to a 7-2-1 record and some great on-ice results. But how a team with that kind of record handles themselves against lesser opponents also matters, and in that regard, the Canucks passed with flying colours.
Some other notes I took throughout the night.
-I didn’t quite realize just how bad the Sharks really are.
-Thatcher Demko losing his shutout bid late with his family in attendance was too bad. I thought it was goalie interference, and I get that Tocchet likely didn’t want the optics of challenging a goal when you’re up by 10, but it feels like that’s fair game when it’s to preserve your goalie’s shutout, no?
-Great to see Anthony Beauvillier put up a couple of goals in game number 500 tonight.
What’s your instant reaction from tonight? Let me know in the comments section below!