Riding Into Calgary With the League’s Top-Three Scorers, Canucks Look to Pick Up a Pair of Points Against Flames

The Vancouver Canucks sink their teeth into the second of back-to-backs with a battle against the Calgary Flames on Thursday night. 

The team is coming off an exhilarating 4-3 overtime win against the New York Islanders on Wednesday night that saw captain Quinn Hughes bury a wrist shot into the top corner to give the Canucks a 12-3-1 record on the year.  

The team will now focus on a divisional rival and will look to build on their strongest start to a season in franchise history.  

Waiting for them in Calgary, and currently sitting with a 5-8-2 record, the Flames have been struggling to pick up wins this season but were able to snag a 2-1 victory over the Montreal Canadiens on Tuesday. The Flames just went through an identical road trip to the Canucks as each team went through Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal. 

Nazem Kadri is leading the offence for the Flames with nine points in 15 games this year.  

Blake Coleman and Andrew Mangiapane each have four goals on the season and one of the surprises in the Flames’ lineup has been 22-year-old Connor Zary. 

Zary played his junior hockey with the Kamloops Blazers and captained the WHL squad during the 2020-21 season. Last year, Zary spent his year in the AHL with the Abbotsford Canucks’ rival, the Calgary Wranglers. As a 21-year-old, Zary picked up 21 goals and 37 assists in 72 AHL games last season.  

The youngster has been producing during the early stages of his NHL career and is now up to three goals and three assists in six games with the Flames. Zary joins Kadri and Martin Pospisil on the Flames’ second line. 

On the backend, former Canuck Chris Tanev mans a second-pairing alongside Noah Hanifin. The third pairing will be an interesting one to watch as left-shot defenceman Nikita Zadorov brings physicality to the lineup amongst trade rumours.  

Between the pipes, former Canuck Jacob Markstrom has started two-thirds of the Flames’ games this season. He sports a 3-6-1 record, a 0.905% save percentage and a 2.72 goals-against average. Markstrom was excellent in his last game – stopping 34 of the 35 shots he faced in a 2-1 win over Montreal.  

On the Canucks side of things. 

If you take a peek at the NHL’s points leaders, you’d struggle to not find a Canuck at the top. Three Canucks have a tie for the league lead in points with J.T. Miller, Elias Pettersson, and Quinn Hughes each having 26 points on the season.

Quinn Hughes joins Bobby Orr, Dennis Potvin, and Doug Wilson as the only defencemen to have five three-point games within the first 16 games of a season. 

Hughes also set a new franchise record as the quickest player to 20 assists in a season – doing it in 16 games and one-upping Henrik Sedin, who did it in 17 games back in the 2010-11 season.  

Captain Quinn is driving offence with his combination of skating and vision in the offensive zone. He’s not just picking up points either, he’s creating goals -- 12 of his 20 helpers have been of the primary assist variety. 

It’s not just Hughes who’s picking up primary assists this season, both Miller (10) and Pettersson (12) are in double-digits for primary assists this season.  

Miller has been electric of late. He’s currently riding a five-game point streak in which he has totalled up 10 points (4g-6a). In each of these past five games, Miller has won at least 10 faceoffs and holds a 59.1%-win percentage in the dot over the past handful of games. 

The Canucks aren’t just atop the points leaderboard in the NHL, Brock Boeser has continued his scoring ways in the opening quarter of the season and after scoring seven goals in his past seven games, Boeser shares a tie with Auston Matthews and Kyle Connor for the league lead with 13 goals on the season.  

One player who’s due for some bounces is Dakota Joshua.  

Only trailing Boeser in terms of individual expected goals over the past five games, Joshua has been going to the net with consistency throughout the past two weeks and since being a healthy scratch in San Jose on November 2nd, he is averaging 4.7 hits per game and has not been on the ice for an even-strength goal-against. On top of his physical play, no Canuck has more primary assists at even-strength than Joshua since the scratch. He’s creating offence for his linemates and still getting a lot of his own chances. 

Note that game time is 6:00 pm PT tonight from Calgary. The game can be viewed on Sportsnet and you can hear Brendan Batchelor and Randip Janda call a superb game, as they always do, over on Sportsnet 650.