VANCOUVER -- Rick Tocchet doesn’t want to read much into his Vancouver Canucks holding Connor McDavid without a shot on goal in Game 1 of the Western Conference Second Round, or any apparent success against the Edmonton Oilers center in the regular season.
McDavid did have an assist in the 5-4 loss to the Canucks in the series opener Wednesday but failed to record a shot for the first time in his 55 Stanley Cup Playoff games. That came after Vancouver limited McDavid to three points (one goal, two assists) and a minus-4 rating in three regular-season games, well below his 1.77 points-per-game average against the rest of the NHL this season.
“We have some strategies. I'm not saying that it always works all the time,” said Tocchet, the Canucks coach. “This guy is the best and he's wanting to be the best ever.”
Tocchet was quick to point out that those three games -- all Canucks wins -- came in the first month of the season, with the Oilers off to a 3-9-1 start before firing coach Jay Woodcroft and assistant Dave Manson on Nov. 12 and replacing them with Kris Knoblauch and Hall of Fame defenseman Paul Coffey, respectively. McDavid missed the Oilers’ fourth game against the Canucks, a 3-1 Vancouver victory April 13, with a lower body injury.
“So, I don't know if how much stock I take in it other than the fact we're playing a team game,” Tocchet said. “I don't know if we have any magic against him.”
McDavid had an assist, two shots and was minus-3 when the Oilers opened the season with an 8-1 loss in Vancouver on Oct. 11, but had a goal, an assist and eight shots in their second game, a 4-3 loss in Edmonton three days later. He did not have a point and finished with three shots in a 6-2 road loss Nov. 6.
"You cannot defend Connor McDavid skating backwards,” Tocchet said. “When you defend, you’ve got to skate forward. I don't like backwards skating and I think that helps us defend better. … You have to skate forward, so whatever position you’ve got to get in before to skate forward, that's what we preach.”
That starts with the Vancouver forwards trying to take away space and prevent the speedy McDavid from winding up coming out of his own end. The Canucks’ second defense pair of Tyler Myers and Carson Soucy played the most against McDavid’s line in Game 1, followed closely by Quinn Hughes and Filip Hronek. But Soucy was quick to credit the forwards for making life a lot easier for the defensemen.
“I think our forwards all night just did a good job of kind of being in front of them while they're trying to wind up their speed,” Soucy said. “They do such a good job finding those open opportunities, open ice of winding up speed that makes it hard on us just to keep a gap. So, it starts with our forwards just kind of getting in their way, just kind of limit that one extra second of that extra speed they had and then in the [defensive] zone we did a good job of closing when we could, give them their space, just kind of limit that extra breakdown. We did a good job.”
Vancouver’s top line of center J.T. Miller with Brock Boeser and Pius Suter played the most against McDavid, averaging more than 11 minutes head-to-head between the three of them in a matchup that was successful for the Canucks in the regular season too. They were followed by center Elias Lindholm with Conor Garland and Dakota Joshua, a line that played less than half those minutes against McDavid.
McDavid still leads the playoffs with 13 points (one goal, 12 assists) in six games. But he could be without his left wing from the first round, Adam Henrique, who missed Game 1 of the best-of-7 series with an undisclosed injury and is day to day entering Game 2 here Friday (10 p.m. ET; CBC, TVAS, SN, SN360, TNT, truTV, MAX).
The Canucks won’t change their approach either way.
“We just did a good job as a five-man unit and everyone knew what they're doing and no one was off script,” defenseman Quinn Hughes said after Game 1, “and when everyone is on the same page, it makes it easier to defend a special player like that. We watched a lot of film and we’ve just got to keep doing that.”
