Sunday April 3 - Vegas Golden Knights 3, Vancouver Canucks 2 (OT)
Wednesday April 6 - Vancouver Canucks at Vegas Golden Knights (7 p.m. PT)
With their playoff hopes now running on fumes, the Vancouver Canucks are set to hit the road for back-to-back games against the Vegas Golden Knights on Wednesday and the Arizona Coyotes on Thursday.
After falling in overtime to Vegas on home ice on Sunday, the Canucks remain eight points out of a wild-card spot with 12 games left on their schedule. The one slice of sort-of-good news is that both wild-card teams, Nashville and Vegas, have 82 points. But the Predators have played three fewer games, so they're still in a pretty good spot.
At this point, though, it's looking like the only *real* challenger who could still knock out the Preds or the Golden Knights is Dallas. The Stars are at 81 points and have played the same number of games as Nashville, 68.
Moneypuck lists the current playoff odds like this in the race in the West:
WC1 - Nashville - 68 GP, 82 pts, 85.3%
WC2 - Vegas - 71 GP, 82 pts, 53.9%
9th - Dallas - 68 GP, 81 pts, 75.2%
10th - Winnipeg - 70 GP, 76 pts, 1.2%
11th - Vancouver - 70 GP, 74 pts, 1.3%
Two big takeaways here:
• With the Golden Knights still only at about 50/50 despite their current five-game winning streak, they'll still have plenty to play for when they host Vancouver on Wednesday night.
• To give you an idea of just how small that 1.3% chance is for the Canucks, Moneypuck now has the New York Islanders higher than Vancouver, at 2% to qualify in the East — a race that has appeared closed since...before Christmas?
The Islanders have won four in a row but are still nine points behind Washington, currently in the second wild card. And despite their absolutely brutal start to the season, the Islanders now have 73 points in 68 games, which gives them a better points percentage than the Canucks (.537 vs. .529).
To make matters worse, injuries and illness appear to be rearing their heads for Vancouver.
After originally announcing a Monday practice, the club decided to take a maintenance day instead. Then, just before hitting the ice on Tuesday, they announced that Brock Boeser is out with an upper-body injury.
Boeser appeared to be hurt on Sunday, in a collision with Elias Pettersson and Ben Hutton.
It's hard to see what happened from the video above. And Boeser did end up returning to the game. But the announcement suggests that, at minimum, he won't be making the road trip.
And if it turns out that we don't see him again for the last three-and-a-half weeks of the season, it's not a great finish for him as he heads toward restricted free agency, with a required qualifying offer of $7.5 million.
Boeser's at 19 goals and 19 assists for 38 points in 64 games this season. That's 0.59 points per game, significantly below his career average of 0.78. And it's a step backward from last season — where he was actually one of the bright lights. He stayed healthy, playing all 56 games. His 23 goals and 49 points were both tops on the team. And his 16.3% shooting percentage was the best of his career. He has averaged 13.0%, and this year he slid all the way back to 10.7%.
Boeser enjoyed a bit of a boost when Bruce Boudreau first came on the scene. His five goals and eight points in eight games in December were his most productive month in terms of per-game output, and his four game-winning goals all came in December and January.
But Boeser went 3-4-7 in 10 games in February and 4-4-8 in 14 games in March, and kind of slipped back into the shadows.
From a cap management point of view, these circumstances are somewhat favourable for the Canucks. Boeser's bargaining position won't be strong. And with other clubs also dealing with salary-cap constraints, the potential threat of another organization outbidding Vancouver for Boeser's services if they don't qualify him is perhaps more muted than it would be in a different year.
Still, it'll be a delicate dance if they decide to go down that road, which will test the mettle of the new management group. If Boeser is qualified, he's also eligible to file for arbitration. If it comes to that, he could opt for a two-year team that would take him straight to UFA status at the end of the 2023-24 season.
That's one year before the players' Covid-related debt to the NHL is expected to be paid in full, so the cap crunch will probably still be ongoing at that point. But time waits for no one. Boeser will also need to weigh the fact that as he gets older, it will get harder to convince teams to ink him to a long-term pact.
Quinn Hughes also missed practice on Tuesday — and, if you missed it, Tucker Poolman withdrew from Sunday's game after just one period, after experiencing a reoccurrence of the migraine headaches that had kept him on the sidelines since late January.
But Brad Richardson was back in action after missing Sunday's game with what was believed to be a stomach bug. So Tuesday's practice lines shook out like this:
Credit to the Canucks for overcoming a two-goal deficit and giving themselves a chance to win on Sunday. But once again, overtime was a mess. That's their fourth-straight overtime loss, and gives them a record of 3-7 in OT for the season. They've also made it to the shootout six times, where they're 3-3.
Now, they'll need to fight for their lives in the unfriendly confines of The Fortress, where Vegas fans have never before seen their team battle just to make the playoffs. And, of course, the Canucks are 1-5-2 all-time at T-Mobile Arena.
To close — even if we don't get playoffs for the Vancouver Canucks this season, their little brothers in Abbotsford have punched their postseason ticket in their first year of operation.
With 70 points in 59 games, the Abbotsford Canucks sit fifth in the AHL's nine-team Pacific Division and have now officially qualified for the playoffs. They took out the Laval Rocket with a pair of home wins over the weekend and, with nine games left to play in their 68-game season, they could still move up. They're currently tied in the standings with the fourth-place Bakersfield Condors, but the Edmonton Oilers farm team does have a game in hand.
Abbotsford has three home games remaining — a pair against the sixth-place San Diego Gulls this Friday and Saturday, and a one-off against the Condors on Tuesday, April 26.
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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