Don’t dance with the devil on Halloween.
The Vancouver Canucks got smoked on home ice last night, blanked by the New Jersey Devils 6-0. In previous games, the Canucks would at least turn in a partial effort. Here, aside from Quinn Hughes and Filip Hronek, no one figured out that they were playing a hockey game, and it showed. This kind of result felt like it had been brewing for a while, given how the efforts the Canucks have turned in seemed to be steadily more and more tepid. Against New Jersey, some big flaws in the team were exposed, and the questions that surrounded the team since the start of the year have only grown louder.
Here’s the loss, by the numbers.
As always, you can find our glossary guide of advanced stats here.

Game Flow

From the jump, the Devils were controlling this game. Sure, they didn’t hammer the Canucks with shots, but New Jersey was getting prime opportunity after prime opportunity. The only period where Vancouver had any semblance of CF% advantage was a narrow 51.43 CF% in the second, while they were handily out-possessed in the first to the tune of 38.89 CF% and third by 41.18 CF%. Logically, that led to a good amount of Devils chances and an expected goals advantage, where New Jersey made sure that the Canucks wouldn’t be sniffing any chance of a comeback.

Heat Map

This is probably the worst heat map that the Canucks have put up all season. Across all situations, New Jersey had a 33-20 lead in scoring chances and a 17-9 high-danger chance edge. At 5v5, those numbers were 28-13 and 15-8 respectively. If you can do quick math, you can put together that Vancouver only had one high-danger chance on the power play. That is straight-up embarrassing and feels like a more than accurate encapsulation of how anemic the man-advantage has been. The zone entries continue to be difficult and even when setting up, they can’t generate any grade A chances. Meanwhile, the defensive breakdowns last night handed the Devils so many prime opportunities, ones that they made no mistake on.

Individual Advanced Stats

Corsi Champ: Given how bad the Canucks were last night, it’s a little easier to believe that Daniel Sprong led the Canucks in the Corsi department with a 56.67 CF%. At the very least, the minutes that the Dutch winger played were somewhat even, seeing a 63.44 xGF% on the night to go with an even 2-2 split in HDCF-HDCA. That much is a bit of a bright spot in an otherwise miserable game: to see Sprong actually be on the right end of the Corsi battle, and being rewarded with a shot on PP1 as a result of that and JT Miller’s lackadaisical game.
Corsi Chump: Brock Boeser was not at his best. Not only did his CF% stand at 20.00, but also posted a team-low 0.15 xGF and 17.22 xGF%. He and his line with Miller and Jake DeBrusk simply were not effective at 5v5 play, especially given that they were hard-matched against the Devils’ top line who handily outperformed them. It’s hard to win games when your best players aren’t playing up to snuff, as well as losing a straight head-to-head with the opposition’s best.
xGF: Elias Pettersson led the Canucks with a 69.30 xGF% share last night. Here’s the thing – it was never about generating expected goals for Pettersson, who’s still been getting great looks game after game. The problem is that he can’t bury a single one of them and looks scared to take his chances. Petey was on ice for a 5-8 deficit in scoring chances, but saw a 3-1 high-danger chance advantage. There were opportunities, but once more the Swede just isn’t looking right at all. Leading the way in raw xGF once more was Erik Brännström with a 0.94, but we’ll get to the reason why this wasn’t all a good thing in just a moment.
GSAx: At some point, you’ve got to feel bad for Arturs Silovs. It’s clear that the confidence isn’t there and the team in front of him wasn’t doing the Latvian netminder any favours. The Devils only had a total of 2.42 xGF on the night, and with 6 goals against on 22 shots, Silovs finished with a -3.58 GSAx. The only consolation in this all was that four of the goals came from high-danger chances, with a total of 10 high-danger shots against. The other two tallies were off middle-danger shots, so there wasn’t a true softy. However, Silovs didn’t look comfortable at all, and honestly could use some more time in the AHL to get his game back on track.

Statistical Musings

Where the bottom 4 defencemen were a tire fire: After a rough outing by Vincent Desharnais, Noah Juulsen drew into the lineup with Vancouver hoping to get a better defensive performance out of their unit. Spoiler – it was anything but that. The gap between Hughes-Hronek and the rest of the defence could not have been any bigger last night. Carson Soucy and Tyler Myers continued to be putrid, Soucy finishing with the worst xGF% of any defencemen with 31.80 while Myers gave up the second-most xGA amongst defencemen of 0.78.
Unfortunately, Brännström-Juulsen wasn’t much better themselves either. Juulsen wasn’t far behind Soucy in the xGF% department, the second-worst defenceman with 32.29 xGF% while being on ice for 6 high-danger chances against. As mentioned before, Brännström was on ice for the most xGF of any Canuck last night. The problem was that he was also on ice for the most xGA of any Canuck with a 0.96, with 13 scoring chances against and 8 high-danger chances against, all of which were team-highs. The lack of defensive depth is seriously hurting Vancouver, and it was very apparent last night.
A lot of mixing and matching: The forward lines were tossed in a blender last night as Tocchet looked to try and create a spark. The one that stayed together for the longest was Sherwood-Blueger-Heinen, who led the Canucks forward lines with a 50.00 CF% (with over 2:10 TOI) and posted the most xGF of 0.67. In total, Vancouver tested out 7 line combinations, with DeBrusk-Pettersson-Sprong the only other line to crack 50.00 CF% and xGF%, albeit in only 2:07 TOI.

As a team

CF% – 50.00% HDCF% – 34.62% xGF% – 46.98%
It was not a good game for the Canucks. Nothing was going right aside from Hughes-Hronek, and the team just didn’t show up around them. Silovs wasn’t at his best, the team defence was blowing their coverages, and everything just blew up in their faces. It felt like the accumulation of bad habits brewing in the last couple of games, peaking in this abomination of a contest.
Vancouver heads into San Jose to face the Sharks on Saturday.
Stats provided by naturalstattrick.com