PHILADELPHIA — The Vancouver Canucks fell well short against the Philadelphia Flyers.
It wasn’t just that the Canucks lost their first game of this young regular season, though. It’s that almost to a man they fell well short of an acceptable effort.
“We didn’t win enough battles, we weren’t strong on the walls, we’re not really breaking out, we’re not making plays,” J.T. Miller said after the game.
Advertisement
We barely need to get into the specifics of this one. The club had a sloppy start, briefly found its game and then got flattened in the latter 40 minutes, including an ugly third period in which the Canucks were shelled for 22 shots by the rebuilding Flyers. Ultimately, they lost 2-0 to a team with no realistic shot of making the playoffs.
Tuesday night, outside of the performance of goaltender Thatcher Demko, Vancouver’s shortcomings were legion. Defensive miscues, weak structural discipline, feckless one-handed pass attempts and low hockey IQ plays characterized the performance. Even if the club was similarly outshot and undisciplined in the 4-3 victory in Edmonton on Saturday night, the connective tissue between that performance and this one was superficial.
Unlike in their weekend victory in northern Alberta, the Canucks showed zero competitive edge and failed to manage the game with anything resembling tactical nous or savvy. “The compete wasn’t there,” exclaimed a frustrated Rick Tocchet. “They competed; we didn’t. I don’t really have anything (else) to say. No compete, and we tried in spurts, but it’s not good enough.”
Yes, on Tuesday night in Philadelphia, the Canucks made like the Arizona Diamondbacks up the road in the NLCS against the Phillies and were just flat-out beaten.
“I can’t even pick one guy who played well other than Demko, who was unreal,” Tocchet said. “He was great tonight, and the rest of the guys weren’t.”
“We just have some guys,” Tocchet continued, sighing for emphasis, “they’ve got to pick it up.
“I don’t like to use the word ‘soft,’ but I just didn’t see guys competing, and that’s alarming. Now, saying that, you win two games, we said, ‘Let’s not get too high.’ It’s the same thing: It’s a bad effort; let’s not get too low. We’ve got to go to the drawing board with some guys here, boy — you can’t be throwing up goose eggs again.”
Advertisement
In breaking this down and trying not to hyperventilate about a mid-October performance, it’s worth pausing to remind ourselves that the Canucks are still off to a relatively encouraging 2-1-0 start. On balance, anyone around the team would’ve taken that record from their first three games if offered such an outcome 10 days ago.
Still, this felt a little too familiar for a team that has perpetually underwhelmed in recent years. This is a side that simply hasn’t earned the benefit of the doubt from close observers or the fans. Certainly, the head coach wasn’t willing to extend any such charity to his group based on how it performed against the Flyers.
“We weren’t smart everywhere,” Tocchet said. “It’s a good lesson for us. Who are we to think we’re anybody?”
That rhetorical question is impossible to interpret as anything other than an indictment of the entitled performance the Canucks offered up. There can be no question that this coach — who was critical of his club’s showing Saturday, even in victory — won’t stand for showings like this, at least not without consequences. Tocchet juggled his lines and defence pairs aggressively in the third period, and one should reasonably expect the club to roll out a new-look lineup at practice Wednesday in Tampa Bay and against the Lightning on Thursday.
“My card, man,” Tocchet said, referring to the handheld lineup card coaches refer to on the bench during games, “I have so many combinations it would make your head spin. I was looking for somebody or a line to take charge, but we had a tough time. Sometimes if you have four or five guys that aren’t good, you can get through it, but we had a lot of guys that weren’t good today.”
For as much as the club’s performance left a lot to be desired Tuesday night, it was interesting to note how divergent Tocchet’s tone was from that of his players. Though the frustration was evident in the dressing room, the commentary from the players came nowhere close to matching the tone of Tocchet’s assessment.
Advertisement
“Obviously, not our night. We didn’t play great. Our goalie kept us in it, he was unbelievable for us tonight, and it could’ve been worse for us than it was,” Quinn Hughes said.
“For us, we didn’t deserve the win tonight, but it’s three games in,” Hughes continued. “Like I said after the first two games, it didn’t mean anything. After tonight, same thing. We have a long way to go.”
Miller, likewise, was attempting to keep an even keel, though he wore his frustration somewhat closer to the surface, as you’d expect.
“I don’t want there to be a sense of panic in the room,” Miller said. “It’s game three and we’re 2-1-0, but at the end of the day, we’ve got to hold ourselves accountable to the standard we think we can play to, and this was not up to our standard today.”
Demko, who was unwilling to discuss his individual performance, simply answering, “It doesn’t matter” when asked about his most impressive saves, expressed confidence.
“In the past, this is probably something we’d overreact on, probably let it get to us a little bit,” Demko said. “It’s a good challenge for us to show up in Florida and have two solid games down there. We had some confidence coming into this game, and now we know where we’re at.
“I’m not worried about it. I have all the confidence in the world that this year is going to be different and that this team has matured past the point of letting road trips and strings of games slip. I think we did some good things in the first and the third, and we’ll be better in Florida.”
Newcomer Ian Cole, meanwhile, who has done more winning than anyone else in Vancouver’s dressing room, was intent on looking ahead. In a subtle way, in doing so, he also offered up a challenge to his new teammates.
“I mentioned a level of maturity before, and you have to look at each game individually, of course, but good teams don’t lose two, three or four in a row,” Cole said. “They don’t let that snowball. They say, ‘Hey, this is what went wrong; let’s go out and have a better effort next game.’ So I’m very hopeful, and I’m really interested to see how we respond. We’re playing a really good hockey team down in Tampa, a team that really knows how to win. … Hopefully we can rise to the challenge, but it’s a great opportunity, and we’ll work on the things that, honestly, we didn’t do great tonight.”
Advertisement
That’s the thing about an abysmal outing like the Canucks put together Tuesday. It’s only a big deal if it extrapolates, if the club’s two-game trend of being massively outshot and taking penalties in bunches carries into the next game and the game after that.
If it’s arrested, however, if the club can get more out of its supporting pieces Thursday and more from its star players too, then getting outworked and dismantled by a lottery-bound Flyers team can be made into a footnote on a trip that began with such promise and is now at an unnervingly familiar crossroads as the club flies south for a pair of tough road games in the Sunshine State.
What matters most is what comes next.
(Photo: John Geliebter / USA Today)