The Vancouver Canucks Young Stars hit the ice at 2 p.m. on Sunday for the second game of their annual prospects tournament, against the Winnipeg Jets.
Here's the scene a couple of hours before game time at the South Okanagan Events Centre.
The Party on the Plaza outside the @SOEC is rocking! Bouncy castle, rock wall, road hockey & more! pic.twitter.com/TGGx48WmdR
— Vancouver Canucks (@VanCanucks) September 13, 2015The Canucks are coming off an 8-2 loss on Friday to the Edmonton Oilers, who beat the Calgary Flames prospects 6-3 in Saturday's only game—without Connor McDavid in the lineup.
The Jets opened their tournament with a 3-1 loss to the Flames in a game that lacked the fireworks that the Canucks and Oilers delivered.
Winnipeg's only goal was scored by Brendan Lemieux, who was acquired by the Jets as part of the Evander Kane trade. Brendan is the son of Claude Lemieux and appears to have a bit of his father's snarl, so he'll be a player to watch for. Other highly-touted Jets include defenseman Josh Morrissey and Vancouver's Nic Petan, as well as Danish sniper Nikolaj Ehlers.
According to the game preview on the Jets website, Winnipeg will be looking for a better start and a higher-energy performance today.
Winnipeg plans to play the highly-touted Connor Hellebuyck in goal for the entire game, which could cause fits for the Canucks. I got to see Hellebuyck play with Team USA when I was in Prague in May—he was excellent and was named to the tournament's All-Star Team.
As for the Canucks, Travis Green led the team through a spirited practice on Saturday.
#Canucks skating lines toward end of practice. Don't think Travis Green was too impressed with last half of practice
— Cam Tucker (@CamTucker_Metro) September 12, 2015Green is tweaking his lineup for today's game, most notably moving Jared McCann and Brendan Gaunce up to the first line to play with Jake Virtanen.
Updated #Canucks lines at #YoungStarsTournament:
Gaunce-McCann-Virtanen
Shinkaruk-Zhukenov-Fox
LaBate-Cassels-Abols
Stewart-Pettit-Martin
— Canucks Misconduct (@nucksmisconduct) September 12, 2015I wasn't very impressed with McCann's performance on Friday and was especially troubled by an odd-man rush where he didn't use his linemates at all and took the shot himself, missing the net Ryan Kesler-style.
I've seen a number of reports mention that McCann and Gaunce were working well together and he was feeding Gaunce at other points during the game, so it'll be interesting to see if more offense is sparked by teaming them up with Virtanen.
Changes are also afoot for a power play that generated almost nothing on Friday:
#Canucks may go with four forwards on the power play... first unit: Subban, Cassels, Virtanen, Gaunce and McCann.
— Cam Tucker (@CamTucker_Metro) September 12, 2015After a rough outing for Clay Witt against the Oilers, local boy Jackson Whistle will get the nod in net for Vancouver today. Whistle's not Canucks property—he's an undrafted 20-year-old native of Kelowna who backstopped the Kelowna Rockets to the Memorial Cup Final last spring.
Today's radio broadcast can be found on TSN1410. The livestream's available on Canucks.com, WinnipegJets.com and Sportsnet.ca.
Don't panic if the stream gets glitchy during the first intermission. It started to work again by the beginning of the second period on Friday night—and the exact same thing happened while I had one eye on the Flames/Oilers game last night.
Enjoy the game!