Wednesday March 20 - Vancouver Canucks 7 - Ottawa Senators 4
When Tanner Pearson tapped a Bo Horvat feed past Anders Nilsson to give the Vancouver Canucks a 5-0 lead over the Ottawa Senators early in the third period on Wednesday, I figured we were in for an easy cruise to the finish line.
I couldn't have been more wrong. Pearson's goal turned out to be the game winner as the Senators came thisclose to mounting an amazing comeback by getting within one before Vancouver closed out its 7-4 win with two late goals.
Here are your highlights:
After dealing away Mark Stone, Matt Duchene and Ryan Dzingel at the trade deadline, the Sens looked like a team that was lacking in offensive firepower, managing just 13 shots in the first two periods as Vancouver dominated possession and built a 4-0 lead.
The Canucks went 2-for-3 on the power play—the first time they'd scored two power play goals in a game since the last time they played Ottawa, on the road back in January.
Elias Pettersson got the second assist on both power-play goals, increasing his record-setting rookie points total. He looked positively Sedinian—and cracked that sh*t-eating grin of his—when he acknowledged the crowd when he was congratulated for setting the new franchise record in Chicago earlier this week.
Say what you will about the Canucks hurting their draft-lottery odds. There is something heartening about seeing this group further develop its chemistry—and the personal stats that get a boost from a game like we saw on Wednesday will help improve players' profiles when they're negotiating their next contracts and every time an analyst looks at their HockeyDB page. Those numbers stay with them for life.
On Wednesday, the biggest winner was Loui Eriksson, with a goal and three assists. That gets him up to 27 points—still a modest number, to be sure, but he is now having his best season as a Canuck, so at least he's trending in a positive direction.
Loui's linemates, Bo Horvat and Tanner Pearson, also cashed in on Wednesday. Horvat's now in career-high territory in both goals and points; with two goals and an assist against the Senators, he's up to 27 goals and 57 points, so 30 goals and 60 points are well within reach.
Pearson also had two goals and an assist, giving him 13 goals and 21 points for the year. After being bounced from the Kings to the Penguins before landing in Vancouver, he has four goals and six points in his 11 games since joining the Canucks, which works out to 0.55 points per game—exactly on par with his best season in Los Angeles, when he had 24 goals and 44 points in 2016-17.
It's a strange concept at this late stage of the year, but the Pearson-Horvat-Eriksson combo seems to be showing some chemistry together. The trio swept Wednesday's three-star honours—in order, Horvat, Eriksson, Pearson.
Meanwhile, Brock Boeser extended his career-best point streak to eight games with his 24th goal of the year. Even with his early-season struggles and those 13 games he missed while dealing with his groin injury, Boeser's now up to 52 points in 61 games. He's at 0.85 points per game this season—just a hair below his 0.89 from last year—and has a real shot at surpassing the 29 goals and 55 points that he put up in his stellar rookie season.
The game got a bit ugly late in the second period. Tempers flared when Jake Virtanen pushed Zack Smith into the boards, and wasn't assessed a penalty...
On the next shift, J-G Pageau took out Ashton Sautner in almost exactly the same spot.
Sautner looked like he was in considerable distress, but did return to the game at the beginning of the third period and took a regular shift, finishing with 17:09 of ice time. Pageau was only assessed a minor penalty for boarding on the play, but the hit's getting an extra look from the Department of Player Safety on Thursday.
Guillaume Brisebois also left the bench for a stretch at the end of the second period. Like Sautner, he returned for the third.
Now, the important stuff: having now collected nine of the 10 points that were available to them over the last week, the Canucks narrowed the gap to the second wild-card spot to just four points with the win on Wednesday, but would still need to pass four teams to get there.
Once again, I'll caution you not to start making playoff plans just yet. According to
SportsClubStats, Vancouver's odds of reaching the postseason improved by just half a percentage point with the win on Wednesday. They're now up to 1.3 percent—compared to 50.2 percent for Arizona, 28.8 percent for Colorado, 12.5 percent for Minnesota and 11.1 percent for Chicago.
The team is taking a day off on Thursday and is expected to practice at UBC on Friday ahead of its back-to-back home game this weekend against Calgary on Saturday and Columbus on Sunday.
That means we'll have to wait a little longer for an update on the status of Quinn Hughes.
We do have this:
Quinn and Brady are actually beyond close: they lived together for two years when they both played in the U.S. National Team Development Program, with Brady's father Keith running the show.
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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