Friday November 28 - Vancouver Canucks 5 - Columbus Blue Jackets 0

It took awhile for the Vancouver Canucks to get rolling, but four goals in the third period gave the team a convincing 5-0 win over the Columbus Blue Jackets on Friday night.

Here are your highlights:



As bad as the Blue Jackets' record has been, the fans at Nationwide Arena booed their team off the ice at the end of the game. The loss leaves Columbus alone in last place in the NHL—right as the Canucks move into first overall by virtue of a game in hand over Montreal and Anaheim, who also have 33 points.

Based in part on the assumption that the Canucks were going to miss the playoffs next spring, I've been putting together some tentative travel plans. For the first time, I started to second-guess myself after last night's game. It seems that I am starting to believe.

I'm getting genuinely intrigued to see where this Canucks group will be by the end of the year. It's mind-blowing that they're hanging among the league leaders. Even more exciting—they're still improving. My head spins when I start to think about where Willie could take this roster by the end of the season.

No Dan Hamhuis? No problem. The team doesn't need to be rushing out to find defensive help when Ryan Miller pitches back-to-back shutouts. Miller remains tied for the league lead with 15 wins, and is moving the needle on his personal stats back to respectability. His current .914 save percentage is right on par with his career average, and he's only had one season where he's finished with a better goals-against than his current 2.32—in 2009-10, when he won the Vezina Trophy with an average of 2.22.

Once the goals started to come, the Canucks got contributions from throughout the lineup. Chris Higgins got things rolling with what proved to be the game-winner at the 15:25 mark of the second period. Radim Vrbata channeled his inner Sedin with a gorgeous no-look pass to set up Henrik for the second goal, then Shawn Matthias scored for the second straight game to push the game out of reach.

When a desperate Blue Jackets team pulled Sergei Bobrovsky with 5:29 to go, it took Brad Richardson just seven seconds to win the draw against Boone Jenner and deposit the puck in the empty net for the back-breaker. The goalie returned to his position and Alex Burrows hammered home his sixth of the year to close out the scoring.

All five Canucks goals were scored at even strength, meaning boosts in plus-minus across the board. And who led the way? Luca Sbisa, with a plus-four. Counterintuitively, he and Kevin Bieksa have formed a stellar pair since Hamhuis went down with injury: Sbisa's a plus-six in the last three games, while Bieksa's plus-seven in four games, including the Anaheim contest.

Both players are now plus-three on the season, so these last few games have been marked improvements over the earlier part of the year.

Also nice to see—distribution of ice time among the defensemen was pretty even. Yannick Weber was the low man at 17:05, while Alex Edler played the most at 22:43. No 30-minute nights for this group!

The Blue Jackets proved on Friday night that a strong night in the faceoff circle does not translate directly into wins. Columbus won 53 percent of the draws overall and Ryan Johansen absolutely schooled Henrik, winning 13 of 15. Henrik's overall success rate was just 29 percent, and even Bo Horvat had a rough night, going 3-for-7.

But we need not worry too much. The Canucks went into Columbus and collected their two points without much fuss against a reeling team.

Sunday morning's game against the Red Wings will be a much tougher test. I expect Ryan Miller will get the start in his old stomping grounds, facing his brother Drew, in Detroit. The Wings came back from a 4-1 deficit to beat the New Jersey Devils in a shootout on Friday night—they're on a three-game winning streak and are just two points behind the Canucks in the league standings.

One final video to wrap today. Derek Dorsett didn't figure in the scoring, but he made the highlights and had a quick visit with his old teammates when he missed a hit on Brian Gibbons of Columbus and ended up head first in the Blue Jackets' bench. Quite the swan dive!



I'm always amazed that nobody on the bench ends up getting clipped by a skate when players find themselves in these predicaments.

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