Oh boy.

The Vancouver Canucks dropped a 5-2 decision to the St. Louis Blues in miserable fashion. For two periods, the team looked lifeless, unable to do much of anything. The systems were a mess, the zone entries non-existent, and the chance generation next to nothing while bleeding opportunities against. It wasn’t good, and even when the team “figured it out” in the third statistically, it barely moved the needle.

Here’s the loss, by the numbers.

As always, you can find our glossary guide of advanced stats here.

There were not a lot of redeeming qualities to how the game went for the Canucks. The first 5 minutes looked acceptable, but after that, the Blues just walked all over them. Through the second, they didn’t post a CF% over 45 percent, giving up 26 scoring chances with 14 high-danger chances among them. Naturally, that led to a 2.61 xGA through the first two periods, which isn’t the greatest to be giving up. That is especially in contrast to the Canucks’ own 14 scoring chances, 5 high-danger chances, and 1.53 xGF.

The third was a little better. Vancouver pumped their numbers up with 5 high-danger chances alone in the final frame with an 89.71 xGF%. But, even at that, they managed to accumulate only 0.98 xGF, which, considering the circumstances, just wasn’t good enough. It made the final numbers a little more palatable, but realistically didn’t do too much to change the course of the game.

The heat map is further confirmation of what the eye test and numbers showed. Vancouver was quite ineffective at generating their own scoring chances and high-danger chances, while St. Louis was able to do both of these in bunches. The Blues held a 15-10 high-danger chance edge at 5v5, managing to maximize their offence at even strength where the Canucks really couldn’t get anything going. And with 52:11 of 5v5 action, that’s a problem for Vancouver.

Corsi Champ: Arshdeep Bains led the Canucks with a 68.18 CF% last night, playing most of his minutes against the Blues’ second line and doing pretty decently. He was on ice for a goal for, tying for the team-best xGA of 0.18 and recording the second-best xGF% on the team with a 75.87. Bains also managed to hold a 1o-4 scoring chance edge and 3-1 high-danger chance margin too. All good numbers and good for the winger – but when he’s the team leader in these categories, something is going pretty darn wrong.

Corsi Chump: Bringing up the rear in the Corsi department was Drew O’Connor, recording an 11.11 CF% for a brutal night in puck possession. That number was -46.54 CF% rel to team average, meaning that while he was on the ice, the Canucks possessed the puck worse by nearly 50%. Naturally, DOC was on ice for a 1-10 shot difference, conceding a team-worst 1.3 xGA and posting a team-low 0.07 xGF. The scoring chances stood at 1-13 for the Blues with 7 high-danger chances by the opposition. There were no high-danger chances for.

xGF: It’s nice to see that Elias Pettersson was at least able to lead the team in a category last night. He posted the team’s best xGF% at 76.24, recording the 5th-best xGF on the team with 1.08 and the 4th-best xGA at 0.34. Pettersson was on ice for the second-most high-danger chances on the team with 4, which isn’t the worst considering the context of the game. Unfortunately, for all the promise that the numbers had, Pettersson didn’t do anything with it and wasn’t able to help the Canucks generate a goal. That doesn’t mean that these numbers are invalid, or that he had a bad game, but Pettersson should be held to a higher standard.

GSAx: Kevin Lankinen made his season debut last night and didn’t exactly steal the game for the Canucks. St. Louis posted a total of 3.15 xGF across all situations, meaning that the Finn tallied up a -0.85 GSAx. The distribution of goals wasn’t the worst though, with 3 of the 4 goals coming off high-danger chances and the remaining one being a middle-danger chance. This all makes sense with the probabilities of these chances being converted into goals, but it also highlights the Canucks’ issues when it came to preventing these looks. Not all goalies are going to be Thatcher Demko and be able to steal games single-handedly, which is what Lankinen demonstrated to Vancouver last night.

Extra Seasoning Required: For all of the good things that Braeden Cootes did during training camp and the preseason, it’s becoming apparent that he isn’t thriving in the role that the Canucks have him deployed in thus far into the year. On a line with O’Connor and Jonathan Lekkerimaki, the trio were absolutely plastered against the Blues, recording a team-worst 13.04 CF% and 6.94 xGF%. That’s right, they didn’t even manage to break a 10% share of the expected goals during their TOI, which wasn’t insignificant given that they played the second-most minutes of any forward line at 5v5 action. Giving up 7 high-danger chances without getting a single high-danger chance of their own looks bad on paper, but gets even more when considering that all of their faceoff starts came in the offensive zone. Suffice it to say that they’re not clicking very well.

Most of the metrics the Canucks generated came in the third period, making these final numbers look a lot better than they probably deserved to be. There was not much redeeming about this game where all their star players looked tepid. Without Demko to bail them out, the lifelessness of this team was really exposed for what they were, unable to generate much of anything or play good defence. It remains to be seen if this team can adapt, or if this is yet another failed experiement.

Vancouver has some time off before heading into Dallas to face the Stars on Thursday.