The Vancouver Canucks will look to get back to their winning ways on home ice when they welcome the Minnesota Wild to Rogers Arena on Thursday night.
Tuesday night’s affair against the New Jersey Devils saw the Canucks come back from a 5-2 third-period deficit but ultimately give up a goal in the final minute to bring their home record to 8-3-1.
Head coach Rick Tocchet is looking for more consistency from his team and wasn’t pleased with the team’s ability to fall back on their structure in the loss to the Devils.
Thursday night provides another tough test for the Canucks. The Wild have not had a great start to the season and that resulted in them firing their coach four games ago. But now, with John Hynes behind the bench, the Wild are a team on a four-game winning streak and have only allowed five goals through this four-game heater under the new coach. Their top-six has been heating up and the team is getting that ‘new coach bump’ that we see consistently around the league.
Over their winning streak, Mats Zuccarello has led the way with six points while Kirill Kaprizov and Matt Boldy each have five points over the stretch. The Wild's new top line of Kaprizov, Zuccarello and Marco Rossi has not been on the ice for a goal against since Hynes took over behind the bench and though the Wild have the league’s worst penalty kill by conversion percentage, they have only allowed one power play goal against since Hynes took over.
We will see some impressive young players on this Wild roster. We mentioned Rossi and Boldy earlier, and the two 22-year-olds are staples in the Wild’s top-six. The Wild selected Boldy with their first-round pick in the 2019 NHL Entry Draft and Rossi with their first-round pick in 2020. There are some strong young players on the Wild’s roster and it’s not just their forwards.
21-year-old, right-shot defenceman Brock Faber has been eating up a lot of minutes this season on the Wild’s top-pairing and he’s performed extremely well defensively. Even with tough matchups, Faber has excellent defensive numbers that match his equally excellent last name. You’ll see Faber on the penalty kill for the Wild as well but as we alluded to earlier, the Wild have the worst penalty kill in the league – only killing off 71.1% of their penalties this season.
\Quick hits on the competition \
- Joel Eriksson Ek leads the team with 12 goals in 23 games.
- Jonas Brodin is the leading minute man, he is averaging 24:20 through 23 games and will play on the top pairing with Faber, and also kills penalties.
- Filip Gustavsson and Marc-Andre Fleury are in a 1A-1B goaltending situation, Gustavsson has 14 starts this season while Fleury has nine. Gustavsson started on Tuesday and stopped 28 of the 30 shots he faced against the Calgary Flames.
- The Wild will be in their second game of a three-in-four stretch. They played the Flames on Tuesday and will conclude the three-in-four with a return to Alberta to face the Edmonton Oilers on Friday night.
The Canucks have a 4-6-0 record in their last 10 games and during the postgame media availability on Tuesday night, Tocchet spoke about the team struggling a little bit and that it’s on him to get the players to get back to their structure and system.
Through the rough patch, Nils Höglander has been playing excellent hockey. The 22-year-old Swede has played 113 minutes over the past 10 games and has only been on the ice for two goals against in that stretch. He has been receiving more ice time from the head coach and getting a chance to skate in the top-six at times. Höglander’s ability to be a spark plug on a line has helped the coach use him throughout the lineup but his spot in the bottom-six has also been impressive as his lines continue to control the share of goals at five-on-five.
Höglander now leads the Canucks in goal share percentage at five-on-five. Here’s the simple way of saying this, in Höglander’s 249 minutes of five-on-five play this season, the Canucks have scored 16 goals and only allowed four. That gives Höglander an 80% control of the goal share and puts him second in the league to Aleksander Barkov (81.82%) for the league leader in control of five-on-five goal share.
After finding the back of the net once again on Tuesday night, Brock Boeser continues to hold the league lead for goals. He’s now up to 18 on the season and has a two-goal lead on a four-way tie for second place.
Thursday night is set to provide an exciting night at Rogers Arena with the Wild and their new coach bump running at their best so far this season and the Canucks looking to get back to what made them successful in the earlier part of the season. The coaching staff is working hard to dial this group back into playing in the system and structure that Tocchet often speaks about.
Home ice has been good to the Canucks this season and they aim to maintain that all season long, and this should be a motivated Canucks team after their loss on Tuesday night.
Get set for two eager teams to battle on Thursday night. The game is scheduled for 7:00 pm PT and you can watch the game on Sportsnet or listen to Brendan Batchelor do what he does best as he handles the play-by-play for the radio broadcast on Sportsnet 650.
