Sunday October 20 - Vancouver Canucks 3 - New York Rangers 2
After a grinding game in New Jersey on Saturday, I thought the Vancouver Canucks might look tired on Sunday against the New York Rangers.
To their credit, they came out with guns blazing and built a 3-0 lead in the first. By the third, they were hanging on for dear life as they improved their record on their current road trip to 2-1-0 with a 3-2 win.
Here are your highlights:
The Canucks outshot the Rangers 20-13 in the opening frame and built their lead with a power-play goal from Bo Horvat, an even-strength goal from Brock Boeser and a shorthanded marker from Jay Beagle that turned out to be the game winner.
Horvat's goal was the 100th of his career. He became just the fourth player from his 2013 draft class to hit that milestone, and the first to do it who didn't make the NHL as an 18-year-old.
Cap's in very good company:
• Sean Monahan - 174 goals in 481 games
• Nathan MacKinnon - 159 goals in 464 games
• Aleksander Barkov - 135 goals in 421 games
• Bo Horvat - 100 goals in 385 games
As an aside — how crazy is it that Nathan MacKinnon just turned 24 in September and is already nearly halfway to 1,000 career games??
Though, like MacKinnon, he has always seemed like an old soul, Horvat is also one of the younger members of his draft class. He turned 24 in April.
The goal was Horvat's second of the year, after he got credit for shovelling that loose puck past Jordan Binnington in the mad scramble in St. Louis last Thursday. It came as the Canucks continued to work on their power-play deployment, with Boeser and Elias Pettersson swapping spots to shoot from their strong sides and with Quinn Hughes continuing to work up top.
Hughes finished with 5:14 of power-play time in the game as the Canucks went 1-for-3. After a very busy game on Saturday, Alex Edler played just 23 seconds with the man advantage but was still the team's high-minute man overall at 23:46.
Boeser's goal was also his second of the year and raised his shooting percentage for the season so far to 7.7 percent. That's barely half of his career average of 13.9 percent.
Brock gave his dad credit for giving him a tip that he believes helped him score.
The mere act of receiving advice from his dad is probably boosting Brock's spirits at this point. Last week, Duke was allowed to go home after making an amazing recovery from a cardiac incident that left him in critical condition earlier this summer. Now that he's home, that means he's finally able to watch Canucks games again, and offer advice and support to his son.
While we're on the topic of challenging family issues, it's clear that Jacob Markstrom's leave of absence last week was also some serious business.
Iain MacIntyre of Sportsnet said that "Markstrom is keeping private the grave circumstances that took him home to Sweden and whatever emotions they have caused." MacIntyre also mentioned on Sunday's broadcast that the Canucks encouraged Markstromm to take the leave of absence.
We may not know exactly what has gone on, but we saw Thatcher Demko looking a bit shaken when he talked about Markstrom leaving at the beginning of last week. Now, we've got Travis Green sounding emotional when talking about Markstrom's stellar 38-save performance that included withstanding a barrage of pressure from the Rangers in the final frame.
After being little more than a fly on the wall in his first season in Vancouver, Tim Schaller has carved out a regular role for himself on the fourth line despite a glut of available wingers, and has become an integral part of the Canucks' outstanding penalty kill and strong matchup game.
Sounds like he's also buying in to the Canucks' locker-room identity. This is a pretty big statement from a guy who came to Vancouver from the strong team culture in Boston.
“Marky is one of the best guys I’ve ever played with,” Schaller told Iain MacIntyre. “We all have his back. I’ll go to battle for that guy any day. That says a lot about him as a person. It’s pretty inspiring to see what he’s doing.”
Hockey Reference credits Markstrom for four Quality Starts in his five appearances so far this year, for a .800 percentage — where anything over .600 is considered to be good.
Thatcher Demko's 3-for-3 for a perfect 1.00, and the pair's collective .932 save percentage currently ranks them fourth in the league, behind Arizona, Anaheim and Boston.
Markstrom's fiery competitiveness really shone through when he told MacIntyre how much he enjoyed that wild third period on Sunday.
“It’s not going to be so pretty always, especially on a back-to-back. This is a tough and fun building to come into and play. Our performance in the first two periods was super impressive. But I liked the end of the third, when we battled, even better.
“That’s what you miss being away from playing games with your teammates. To have a performance like that the last 10, 15 minutes, that’s fun to see.”
The situation got hairiest when the Beagle line was caught in its zone for 2:40 while the Rangers applied wave after wave of pressure during a long stretch of continuous action in the third period.
Beagle gave Schaller credit for helping the team weather that storm, and also told
The Athletic that his linemate played a key role in his shorthanded goal.
“Another good play by Schaller. He’s talking to me the whole way. Without that, I probably whack it down the ice. I can’t really tell if I have time or not there. Kind of a similar play to the one yesterday, except on my forehand, with Schally’s talking to me there, it allowed me to get my head up and get moving up the ice. Great play.”
What started out looking like it was going to be an easy blowout win on Broadway might have turned into a valuable character builder. Let's see what impact that has as the Canucks finish out their road trip in Detroit on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, down on the farm — there's nothing but good news as the Utica Comets stretched their season-opening record to 5-0-0-0 after home wins against the Charlotte Checkers and Rochester Americans over the weekend.
Though they've played fewer games than many teams, the Comets lead the AHL with 29 goals to date, and their 11 goals against tie them with the Toronto Marlies for first place overall in that category. Pretty much everything is going right.
Reid Boucher currently leads the AHL in both goals (8) and points (10), but it was Nikolay Goldobin who caught the attention of the league's awards team this week.
Sven Baertschi is right behind Goldobin with eight points in four games and Kole Lind has seven points in five games.
With the Comets' impressive goal differential, lots of players are also boasting impressive plus-minus numbers — led by rookie Josh Teves at plus-12. Brogan Rafferty is right behind at plus-eight. He's tied with forward Lukas Jasek, who has been centering Baertschi and Goldobin and has picked up four points of his own along the way.
A bunch of the Comets players made the trip to Buffalo on Sunday to take in the Bills game. They're now off till Friday, when they'll host the Binghamton Devils before visiting Hershey to take on the Bears on Saturday.
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