Vancouver Canucks host Blues as 4 prospects make World Junior final rosters (elias pettersson)

elias pettersson

Vancouver Canucks host Blues as 4 prospects make World Junior final rosters

By Carol Schram

Dec 23, 2017 • 1:59 pm

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Saturday December 23 - Vancouver Canucks vs. St. Louis Blues - 7 p.m. - CBC, Sportsnet 650

Vancouver Canucks: 36 GP, 15-16-5, 35 pts, sixth in Pacific Division St. Louis Blues: 37 GP, 22-13-2, 46 pts, third in Central Division

The St. Louis Blues were flying high when they last rolled into Vancouver on November 18. At that time, the Canucks were one game over .500 and had one win in their previous four games, but pushed the high-scoring Blues to overtime before dropping a 4-3 decision.

Lately, though, the Blues have gone cold. They've lost five of their last six games, including all three on their current Western Canadian road trip, and have now been caught by both Nashville and Winnipeg in the Central Division standings.

In November, St. Louis boasted one of the hottest lines in the league with Brayden Schenn, Vladimir Tarasenko and Jaden Schwartz. The team's offense has dried up since Schwartz suffered a "significant right ankle injury" in a 6-1 win over Detroit on December 9. In the seven subsequent games, they've scored just nine goals and been shut out twice.

Will a date with the defensively deficient Canucks get them back on track, or can Vancouver take advantage of a struggling team to keep scoring at a minimum and pick up a win to get back to .500 going into the Christmas break?

Even through this rough patch, the Blues have still been pretty solid defensively, so the Canucks will need to be stingy if they hope to land on the right side of the ledger tonight.

Here's quick glimpse at who's gathering for today's morning skate:

Jake Virtanen is hanging onto the lucky stick he got from Brock Boeser last game. Smart!

I wonder if Travis is going to make any adjustments to his special teams tonight? Jason Botchford goes to bat for Ben Hutton as an important penalty killer—and considering the Canucks have given up five power-play goals on eight times shorthanded while Hutton has been out of the lineup for the last two games, he might just have a point.

Erik Gudbranson has been decent since he has returned to the lineup after his injury. He's now on a two-game point streak (!) but has been the Canucks' least-used defenseman at 5-on-5 as he has averaged 16:52 of total ice time over the past two games.

If Hutton goes back in, who comes out? Maybe Stecher? We shall see.

Today's slate of games are the last ones before the NHL's three-day Christmas break begins, giving us time to turn our attention to World Juniors and the Spengler Cup.

Now that the tuneup games are complete, final World Junior rosters have been released. All the remaining Canucks prospects will be playing in the tournament:

It's a bit of a relief to see Will Lockwood's name. He took a heavy fall into the boards in Team USA's game against Belarus on Wednesday and didn't return to action—or play Friday night against the Swedes.

Not sure if that's the same side where Lockwood had his shoulder surgery last summer, but he did practice with the Americans on Friday and is pencilled in for the first round robin game against Denmark on Boxing Day.

Elias Pettersson played against the Americans on Friday, pointless as Sweden took the 3-1 loss.

Corey Pronman from The Athletic watched the game last night, and had some interesting comments about Pettersson in this article:

It's behind a paywall so I won't quote, but the quick n' dirty version is that he's concerned that despite Pettersson's great season so far in the SHL, his game doesn't translate well on the smaller North American ice surface.

I'm really looking forward to seeing whether he can play a more dynamic role this year. Obviously, the Canucks are going to need him to figure it out if he's going to have an impact at the NHL level in future.

I haven't talked much about Olli Juolevi because World Juniors is old hat for him. He went from the glory of winning gold in his home country in his draft year to the disappointment of nearly being relegated after a disastrous tournament in 2017.

There has been lots of talk that the Finns go from great to terrible in alternate years, so they should be tracking for another strong performance—and Juolevi should be one of their on-ice leaders.

The Finns kick off their schedule against Canada at 1 p.m. PT on Boxing Day. Sweden plays Belarus earlier that day over at HarborCenter, in a game that isn't televised, then the USA/Denmark clash goes at 5 p.m. PT.

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