Wednesday January 23 - Carolina Hurricanes 5 - Vancouver Canucks 2
Give Carolina credit. Despite playing their third game in four nights and coming off a back-to-back, the Hurricanes successfully executed a solid game plan to get the Vancouver Canucks back on their heels and win their first game in a generation at Rogers Arena/General Motors Place on Wednesday night.
For the Canucks, it was their first multi-goal loss at home since the 5-2 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning back on December 18, with a record of 4-1-2 in between. Pretty good run for the fans!
Here are the highlights from Wednesday night:
No one I talked to at the rink could come up with a logical reason why Wednesday's puck drop was scheduled for 7:30 p.m. PT instead of the usual 7:00. I figured maybe it was a way to try to skip past the part of the game where the Canucks have been starting slow?
The Canucks were still outshot 10-4 in the scoreless opening frame, but Alex Edler did record the first shot of the game—a hundred-foot floater from his own zone that was easily handled by Carolina's 23-year-old Alex Nedeljkovic, making his first career NHL start after playing 30 minutes in one relief effort for the Hurricanes two seasons ago.
With a 20-5-0 record with the AHL's league-leading Charlotte Checkers so far this season, the native of Parma, Ohio was recalled by the Hurricanes a week ago when Curtis McElhinney was injured and earned his first NHL win with relative ease. He made 24 saves and was beaten only on two second-period plays, by Josh Leivo and Sven Baertschi.
Let's pause for a minute to savour that Baertschi goal, though. It came at the end of a gorgeous tic-tac-toe passing play with Brock Boeser and—who else?—Elias Pettersson.
Nasty passing 101 right here. pic.twitter.com/w7Ad2ar5FW
— NHL (@NHL) January 24, 2019
As well as earning enough style points to justify the price of admission, the goal also gave the Canucks a short-lived 2-1 lead, and gave fans the hope that Wednesday's story would mirror the games against Buffalo and Detroit and end with two points.
But the Hurricanes were having none of it. Greg McKegg tied the game with his third of the year barely a minute and a half later, kicking off a stretch of four Carolina goals on seven shots over a 10-minute stretch that also included a Canucks power play.
Nino Niederreiter scored twice, finished the night with eight of the Hurricanes' 34 shots and looks like he's thoroughly enjoying his new situation on a line with Sebastian Aho and Justin Williams. Nino had nine goals in 46 games with Minnesota before he was traded last week. He already has four in four games with the Hurricanes, who have been rumoured to be looking for more scoring punch for much of the season.
After signing his new five-year contract extension with the cap hit of $5.4 million per season last week, Teuvo Teravainen also looked like he's well worth the investment. The 24-year-old finished the night as the game's second star, with a goal and two assists to bump him up to 11-32-43 for the year.
Dougie Hamilton scored the Hurricanes' other goal, his eighth of the year. His name is swirling in trade rumours yet again. He's on pace for just 31 points, well below his usual 40-something, and is averaging about 19 and a half minutes of ice time per game with Carolina this year, in the same ballpark as Brett Pesce and Calvin de Haan, and well below the team's top pairing of Jaccob Slavin and Justin Faulk.
Micheal Ferland missed Wednesday's game with an upper-body injury, so Haydn Fleury dressed as Carolina's seventh defenseman. Now 22 and in his last year of being waiver exempt, the seventh-overall pick from 2014 has appeared in just 12 games in the NHL and 11 in the AHL this season due to concussion issues and some healthy scratches with the Hurricanes. On Wednesday, he got 4:17 of his 8:10 of ice time in the third period, when the game was effectively socked away. He's one of the reasons why the Hurricanes should be able to part with a blueliner from their top four at this year's trade deadline—and you can bet there will be a whole bunch of teams calling.
A week after trading Michael Del Zotto, the Canucks sure looked like they could use some blue-line help, stat. It was another rough night for Derrick Pouliot, who got dinged for three giveaways, which led directly to the third and fourth Carolina goals. After that, he was benched for the rest of the second period and a good chunk of the third. He finished the night with just 9:29 of ice time, his lowest total of the season.
As a result, Alex Edler ended up playing 28:29, including a whopping 10:36 in the third period. It was his second-busiest game of the year, behind the 30:05 he played against the Lightning in December. He goes into the All-Star Break ranked 25th in the league in average ice time among defensemen at 23:30 per game, right in the same range as top players like Shea Weber, Alex Pietrangelo, Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Aaron Ekblad.
Jim Benning acknowledged that the Canucks will need to make a decision on Edler over the next month during a radio appearance on Wednesday afternoon.
Benning says on @Sportsnet650 he wants to sit down with Edler & his agent once he gets back from Top Prospects game. Has NOT had convo with Edler about potentially moving or resigning yet, wants to see where Edler's camp is at.
— Scott Rintoul (@ScottRintoul) January 24, 2019
For the first time in—forever?—it seems like the main ideas being floated about how to improve Vancouver's defense revolve around promoting from within rather than trying to hit a home run with a trade. Quinn Hughes is obviously the biggest target—but he'll need to be managed carefully if the organization wants to avoid having to protect him in the Seattle expansion draft.
The details are complicated, but Ryan Biech posted a full article on Quinn's permutations and possibilities at The Athletic on Monday. He says that Hughes will remain exempt from the 2021 expansion draft as long as he plays no more than 10 NHL games this season—a count that includes both regular-season and playoff games.
Hughes' Michigan Wolverines aren't having a great year; their NCAA season could be over as soon as mid-March, depending on how they perform in the playoffs. The Canucks certainly *could* sign Hughes, then make decisions on managing his usage as needed down the stretch. It might not look like there's any great urgency now to keep protection slots open on the blue line for the expansion draft but as I said a couple of weeks ago, a lot can change in two years. With any luck, the Canucks will be deeper at every position by 2021. It never hurts to have a little extra wiggle room.
After Wednesday's loss, the Canucks head into the All-Star Break with a record of 23-22-6 for 52 points in 51 games. They're sitting ninth in the Western Conference—tied with Dallas and Colorado in points, but having played more games.
Vancouver's points percentage of .510 ties them with the New York Rangers for 19th overall, also ninth in the Western Conference. They're 19th in the league in scoring, 20th in goals against, 22nd on the power play and 20th on the penalty kill, 26th in shots per game, 16th in shots against and 21st in faceoff percentage.
Certainly, they've trended better since they got out of that November losing streak but looking at the season as a whole, it's pretty tough to argue that they *deserve* to be a playoff team.
Still, it'll be fascinating to see how they come back out of the All-Star Break, and what further moves Jim Benning makes heading into the trade deadline.
For now, I'm looking forward to watching our boy Petey at the All-Star Game this weekend. Remember - Skills Competition is Friday night, and the All-Star Game goes on Saturday in the regular Hockey Night in Canada slot.
We'll also have AHL, college and junior hockey to hold our interest until the Canucks get rolling again on February 2 against Colorado.